Take only what you need

Beautiful things take dirty work

There is order in disorder

There are dances (and art) in the day-to-day

You can survive on work and flowers alone

Help others

Hurting others only hurts yourself

Likewise hurting yourself only hurts others

And of course productivity is the key to happiness - and staying alive

“I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures.”

--Vladimir Nabokov

“Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.”

--Nell Freudenberger as told to RL Magazine

“I want to be in a relationship where you telling me you love me is just a ceremonious validation of what you already show me.” 

--Steve Maraboli, 'Life, the Truth, and Being Free'

“As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”

--Steve Maraboli

“…Imagining it was a mountain, a distant mountain, my goal. As long as I kept walking towards the mountain, I would be alright. And when I truly was not sure what to do I could stop and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.”

— Neil Gaiman commencement address

“I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

“I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

--Willa Cather's 'My Antonia'

The shoulder blades

sticking out as if they

wanted to grow wings through

that skin. Little blades,

she was helpless.

--Charles Bukowski

“I came to tell you that you’re beautiful, I think you’re lovely, I think that you’re made for more than you settled for.”

--Levi the Poet

“One day, a long time from now, you’ll cease to care any more whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.”

--J.D. Salinger

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Tender Is the Night'

“I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.” 

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Great Gatsby'

"Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”

--Timothy Leary