Famous Quotes & Sayings

Barbara Kingsolver

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

Barbara Kingsolver

God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

Barbara Kingsolver

There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.

Barbara Kingsolver

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

Barbara Kingsolver

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.

Barbara Kingsolver

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).

Barbara Kingsolver

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

Barbara Kingsolver

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

Barbara Kingsolver

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

Babe Ruth

You just can't beat the person who never gives up.

Ashley Smith

Life is only worth-while through the eyes of a believer.

Ashley Smith

Live life messy and love every moment of it.

Ashley Smith

Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams.

Ashley Smith

Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams.

We are taxing the poor on the necessities of life and that is something most states avoid. But we are doing it with pride.

Michael Mina

There are two ways to look at how life works and how people find their paths. One way is you take your time and try different things out. The other is you settle in early. I was into cooking very early.

Lois Lowry

There are those, I think, who are attracted to the glitz of celebrity life. I am not one of them.

Baruch Spinoza

From what has been said we can clearly understand the nature of Love and Hate. Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause: Hate is nothing else but pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. We further see, that he who loves necessarily endeavors to have, and to keep present to him, the object of his love; while he who hates endeavors to remove and destroy the object of his hatred.

Baruch Spinoza

Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.

Baruch Spinoza

He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives as much as possible to repay the hatred, anger, or contempt of others towards himself with love or generosity. ...hatred is increased by reciprocal hatred, and, on the other hand, can be extinguished by love, so that hatred passes into love.

Baruch Spinoza

If a man had begun to hate an object of his love, so that love is thoroughly destroyed, he will, causes being equal, regard it with more hatred than if he had never loved it, and his hatred will be in proportion to the strength of his former love.

Baruch Spinoza

When we love a thing similar to ourselves, we endeavor, as far as we can, to bring about that it should love us in return.

Baruch Spinoza

He who hates anyone will endeavor to do him an injury, unless he fears that a greater injury will thereby accrue to himself; on the other hand, he who loves anyone will, by the same law, seek to benefit him.

Baruch Spinoza

If anyone conceives, that an object of his love joins itself to another with closer bonds of friendship than he himself has attained to, he will be affected with hatred towards the loved object and with envy towards his rival.

Baruch Spinoza

If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, etc. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillation of the soul.

Baruch Spinoza

In so far as men are influenced by envy or any kind of hatred, one towards another, they are at variance, and are therefore to be feared in proportion, as they are more powerful than their fellows. Yet minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.

Baruch Spinoza

Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.

Baruch Spinoza

The greater emotion with which we conceive a loved object to be affected toward us, the greater will be our complacency.

Baruch Spinoza

Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other things being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.

Baruch Spinoza

Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it...

Baruch Spinoza

If anyone conceives that he is loved by another, and believes that he has given no cause for such love, he will love that other in return.

Baruch Spinoza

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.

Baruch Spinoza

Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.