A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
Anatole FranceRead
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3,063 quotes
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
It ought to be considered a great misfortune, not only for individuals, but also for Houses and Congregations, to have everything in conformity with their wishes; to go on quietly, and to suffer nothing for the love of God. Yes, consider it certain that a person or a Congregation that does not suffer and is applauded by all the world is near a fall.
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.
Timidity is a fault for which it is dangerous to reprove persons whom we wish to correct of it.
Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.
This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.
There's always a price you pay when you lie. Once you introduce a lie into a relationship, even for the best of intentions, it is always there. Whenever you’re with that person again, that lie is in the room too. It sits on your shoulder. Good lie or bad lie, it's in the room with you forever now. It's your constant companion.
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever.
A person who's happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery
As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.
You transition as a mother from literally just pulling a booger out of that person's nose whenever you see one until at some point they assert: "No, I'm a person. You can't fix my underpants on the subway."
Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union
When I go to hell, I mean to carry a bribe: for look you, good gifts evermore make way for the worst persons.
There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
The only person who acts sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. Everyone else goes by their old measurements.
She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
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