Charles Dickens

I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

Don’t ever let anyone keep your heart on a shelf just to take it down whenever it is convenient for them to feel.

I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

And now my neck is open wide, begging for a fist around it. Already choking on my pride, so there’s no use crying about it.

We may tell ourselves that love is not really available. But the deeper truth is that we don’t entirely trust it, and therefore have a hard time fully opening to it or letting it all the way into us. This disconnects us from our own heart, exacerbating our sense of love’s scarcity.

When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you used to be jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning.

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.

I have simply found a way of loving through whatever absences or dejections have fallen like tree branches in my path.

You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation. Sometimes the longest connections yield little growth, while the briefest of encounters change everything. The heart doesn’t wear a watch.

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

Love is not liking somebody. Anyone can do that. Love is loving things that sometimes you don’t like.

My love rumbles like the sternum of a lion. Be mindful of the beast you stir up.

We are asleep until we fall in Love!

I stopped believing in love at first sight. I think you go through that wonderful love stage, but when it gets hard, you need a little bit more.

I have never had trouble to love others, but loving myself was difficult. For years I didn’t like myself, so how could I love myself. It has taken time, and still there is a way to go, but I can say, not only do I like myself, but also care about myself enough to start loving myself too.

Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand. (Anna Karenina)