Marc P. Robinson

They say that history repeats itself, so if you don’t learn from the past you will make the same mistakes. So I have become an archaeologist of my own history. Digging up what has long since been buried, exhuming those forgotten fragments. Trying to distinguish what is real from folklore, trying to gain understanding, rather than relying on myths.

What drives me to be who I am, to do all that I do, is not what words will be engraved for my epitaph. What drives me to be who I am, to do what I do, is not vanity, is not for adulation in the eyes of others. What drives me is my own desire to be better; to be happy. When I am dead and buried, the words above will not bring me back to life, I choose to live out my epitaph, and not just for it to be a collection of words someone has chosen to define me.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

It’s not the adversity, but how you face it.

I look up at the universe and ask, ‘What are you trying to teach me here?’ I know I won’t hear a reply, but asking the question, makes me begin looking for the answer.

When the romance is gone, if it’s always you left searching for it, maybe it’s time to stop looking, and start searching for someone new, and start a new romantic journey.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use the pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time; a tremendous whack.

When you’ve told someone that you’ve left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

It all depends on you. You can go on sleeping forever, you can wake up right this moment.

This is the comfort of the godly: the grave cannot hold them, and they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.