Better

It’s better to fail in originality, than succeed in imitation.

Herman Melville

Happiness

Happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain, by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

John Stuart Nill

Pleasant thoughts

Garner up pleasant thoughts in your mind, for pleasant thoughts make pleasant lives.

John Wilkins

Anger

Anger is a symptom, a way of cloaking and expressing feelings too awful to experience directly – hurt, bitterness, grief, and, most of all, fear.

Joan Rivers

Bridges

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn.

The International

Secret

There are two kinds of secrets: those we keep from others and those we hide from ourselves.

Frank Warren

Spring Day

It was a perfect spring day, and the air was alive with birdsong and bee hum. The daffodils bustled in the breeze and here and there on the side of the hill a few early tulips nodded. A blue powdering of forget-me-nots and fine, fat yellow primroses punctuated the green of the slope.

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

About Stories

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’s eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas – abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.

Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things – Short Fictions & Wonders

Wise man

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

Epictetus

Swallow your pride

I think to myself that when you’re in love, sometimes you have to swallow your pride, and sometimes you have to fight to keep your pride. It’s a balance. But when the relationship is right, you find that balance.

Something Borrowed, Emily Giffin