Quotes

I collect quotes.

Quotes on Writing

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
— Jorge Luis Borges

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.
— Stephen King

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.
— Paul Gallico

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.
― Eugène Ionesco

The reader doesn’t care about you. Readers care about themselves. You want your poem to be a window through which a reader can see something more about the experience of being alive. You try to include only what’s essential so the reader’s attention is focused. Anything inessential is distracting.
― Ellen Bass

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
― Martha Graham

Valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

The best writers show a marked generosity toward the characters in their nonfiction, even those who appear unsympathetic or unredeemable.
― Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, The Big Memoir Pitfall to Avoid | Jane Friedman

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
― Albert Einstein

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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

Failure is success in progress.
― Albert Einstein

Quotes on Reading

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook​

Quotes on Fear

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
― Georgia O’Keeffe

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
― Anais Nin

Quotes on Travel

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination with reality, and instead of thinking of how things may be, see them as they are.
― Samuel Johnson

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
― Pat Conroy

To be worth making at all, a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions.
― Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
― Martin Buber

What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
― Albert Camus

It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others…Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion’s questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

The sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

jetzt mußt du in dein Herz hinaus
wie in die Ebene gehn.
Die große Einsamkeit beginnt
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stundenbuch: Von der Pilgerschaft

All of the answers are within us, but such is our tendency toward forgetting that we sometimes need to venture to a far away land to tap our own memory.
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage