Rumi

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.

Be a lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

If people misunderstand you, do not worry…it is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their mind is…their own thoughts.

Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life … would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

One can resist the invasion of an army, but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.

I always feel excited when I can do something that’s about what I believe in.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

Fidelity has enfranchised slaves, and adopted servants to be sons.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.