~Chateau Quotes~

Welcome to the quotes page. Just a few things I picked up along my way and which perhaps you'd like to take away with you. Included here you will find thoughts from Dylan Thomas, Nelson Mandela, Henry David Thoreau, Kahlil Gibran, Eleanor Roosevelt, Shirley MacLaine, and many others. Enjoy...

"Come to the edge, " He said.
"We can't, master, we're scared."
"Come to the edge, " He said.
they came. He pushed them...
they flew.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Changing The World

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

Unknown monk, 1100 A.D.

Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.

Confucius

Make no judgments where you have no compassion.

Anne McCaffrey

When you aim for perfection, you discover it's a moving target.

George Fisher

The shortest and surest way to live with honor is to be in reality what we appear to be. All virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.

Socrates

It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

James Watson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?...Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure about you...As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

excerpt from a speech by Nelson Mandela

Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.

Paul Brodeaur

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

Simone Weil

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde

All this worldy wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Henry David Thoreau

There is something wiser in us than our head.

Arthur Shopenhauer

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All human wisdom is summed up in two words: wait and hope.

Alexandre Dumas

Patience is the art of hoping.

Vauvenargues

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

Chinese proverb

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics.

Marcel Proust

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others, yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.

C. G. Jung

Courage is the price life exacts for granting peace.

Amelia Earhart

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I am not a teacher, but an awakener.

Robert Frost

Things of quality have no fear of time.

Anonymous

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

Abraham Lincoln

The Best Within You

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved integrity. Do not lose your knowledge that our proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited road. Do no let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it's yours.

excerpted from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The true test of character is...how we behave when we don't know what to do.

John Holt

To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

Anonymous

He who rebukes the world is rebuked by the world.

Rudyard Kipling

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.

Menclus

And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

Kahlil Gibran

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.

Confucius

Fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

Shirley MacLaine

A man wrapped up in himself is a very small bundle.

Benjamin Franklin

Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.

Jean Vanier

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Abraham Lincoln

I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Theodore Roosevelt

Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you.

Frank Tyger

You can't expect to win unless you know why you lose.

Benjamin Lipson

If you see a snake, kill it. Don't appoint a committee on snakes.

H. Ross Perot

Every horse thinks its own pack heaviest.

Thomas Fuller

It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.

Unknown

Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot.

Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, 1973

You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

Al Capone

The journey is the reward.

Taoist Saying

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

Bertrand Russell

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

Haile Selassie

You can't make footprints in the sands of time by sitting on your butt and who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?

Bob Moawad

Fall seven times, stand up eight.

Japanese Proverb

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

D.H. Lawrence

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

Will Durant

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Voltaire

We are each of us angels with only one wing. And we can only fly by embracing each other...

Comte de Bussy-Rabutin

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?

Rabbi Hillel

That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.

Richard Bach

Love is like learning to play the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart.

Unknown

Friends are the angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly.

Unknown

The hardest thing in life to learn is which bridge to cross, and which to burn.

Anonymous

There are two ways of spreading the light:
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Edith Wharton

Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.

Comte DeBussy-Rabutin

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men,'cause Christ wasn't a woman!

Where did your Christ come from?
From God and a woman!
Man had nothing to do with Him.

Sojourner Truth

Fate determines who enters our lives; our actions and reactions determine who stays.

Unknown

I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they chose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas.

Unknown

Accept that some days you�re the pigeon, and some days you�re the statue.

Roger C. Anderson

Your village called. Their idiot is missing.

Unknown

When things are passed like chinese whispers, they loose value and gain rumour.

Unknown

It may be that all people actually have the same desires. They want a happy and spiritually rich life; they harbor a fervent hope for a peaceful society...
Furthermore, doesn't a "gentle heart" that loves all living things dwell deep within any person? That light, like the sun, which constantly pours the strength to live in all things, shines brightly upon darkness, pours warm breath into frozen hearts, melts the hard walls that create estrangement and has the strength to bring people together as one. It surely must shine quietly within you as well. Please first let that sun rise from you for the sake of your enrichment and happiness...to shine upon the people around you and the environment, and to fill the world with warmth.

Kaoru Nakamaru

And now, for my personal favorite...

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.