All of these quotes have in some way carried me through some of the toughest acts of my life. Whether they served to lift me up, put me in my place, or lead me to reflection they have always represented the way I have felt.
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
-Anonymous
"The most wasted day of all is that during which we have not laughed."
-Sebastian R. N. Chamfort
"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter."
-Mark Twain
"If you don't learn to laugh at troubles, you won't have anything to laugh at when you grow old."
-Ed Howe"
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
-Victor Borge
"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly."
-Thomas Hobbes
"Nobody ever died of laughter."
-Max Beerbohm
"Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs: He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they find laughable."
-Anon.
"No one is listening until you make a mistake."
-Anon.
"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."
-John Powell
"There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from."
-Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
"Every man has his follies -- and often they are the most interesting thing he has got."
-Josh Billings
"No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture
of madness."
-Aristotle: Problem, sect. 30.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of
one's ignorance."
-Confucius
"Dream lofty dreams and as you dream, so
shall you become."
- James Allen
"Happiness is not something you experience,
it is something you remember."
-- Oscar Levant
"I always knew that looking back on my
crying would make me laugh... I never knew that looking back on my laughter
would make me cry."
-Anon
"You always smile but in your eyes your
sorrow shows."
-Anon
"The real test of friendship is: can you
literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life
that are utterly simple?"
-Eugene Kennedy
"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.
Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines
it."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
"You don't get to choose how you're going to
die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live now."
-Joan Baez
"When one door of happiness closes, another
opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one
which has opened for us."
-Helen Keller
"Be happy while you're living, for you're a
long time dead."
-Scottish Proverb
"When you are content to be simply yourself
and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you."
-Lao-Tzu
"If being an egomaniac means I believe in
what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that ...
I believe in what I do, and I'll say it."
-John Lennon
"Don't let life discourage you; everyone who
got where he is had to begin where he was."
-Richard L. Evans
"Go confidently in the direction of your
dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
-Henry David Thoreau