The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tag: quotation
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, A Life for a Life
So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Lay Morals
The saddest truth is realising you have fallen madly in love with what can never be.
Michael Faudet (via michaelfaudet)
I assure you it’s fatal—but I never can resist the desire for intimacy, or reconcile myself to the fact that all human relations are bound to be unsatisfactory.
Virginia Woolf, from Selected Letters (via violentwavesofemotion)
‘I’ve always found that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect.’ His eyes searched mine intently, and for a moment we stood there toe to toe. ‘The ones who throw their beauty around, waste what they have? Their beauty is only passing. It’s just a shell hiding nothing but shadows and emptiness.’
Jennifer L. Armentrout, Obsidian
There’s a knowledge among first generation immigrants – that they aren’t going to be the ones to achieve the American Dream. They have to work hard and struggle so that their children will have a shot at it. So they educate their children and pass the Dream along to them. And now I have an obligation to make more fucking money than them, to live the American Dream, to validate all the risks they took and everything they went through. And that’s a heavy burden.
This kid, as told to Humans of New York (via quotesfrombooksandshit)
People are buying candles saying the end of the world is coming. Does no one realise that once the end of the world comes, candles won’t help them?
Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnyan leader (via quotesfrombooksandshit)
secretive dreams 