(via caitthom)

I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.

(via thefreenomad)

We take a risk when we open our hearts because the truth is, if we open our hearts, we will get hurt. You can’t open your heart and not have some hurt because you’re in a human experience. Even if it’s the love of your life and you have many wonderful, deepening, growing, powerful years together, it’s a human experience, and that person will pass over. Love takes courage. Be courageous.

(via thefreenomad)

When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I’ll go and whom I’ll meet inside.

(via thelittlephilosopher)

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

(via thelittlephilosopher)

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand and, sometimes, to find each other.

(via thelittlephilosopher)

A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.

(via thelittlephilosopher)

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

(via myquotelibrary)

Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone.

(via myquotelibrary)

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

(via myquotelibrary)

This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.

(via myquotelibrary)

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal… In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh—not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.

(via myquotelibrary)

It is at moments like these that I know my what my purpose is in life. I am here to love you, to hold you in my arms, to protect you. I am here to learn from you and to receive your love in return.I am here because there is no other place to be.

(via myquotelibrary)

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

(via thefreenomad)

Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.

(via thefreenomad)