Where would be the merit if heroes were never afraid?
Alphonse Daudet

Happiness

To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin.
Lord Byron

Patience

Patience is passion tamed.
Lyman Abbott

Liar

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
Oscar Wilde

If you do it right

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
Mae West

Change

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Andy Warhol

Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.
Ann Landers

A serious response

And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?"
Mary Oliver

Optimists

Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.
Thomas L. Friedman

We go to the sea

We should not forget that when we limp away afflicted through the spirit, it is not to the factory gates or to the corporate steps we pilgrimage. Instead we go to the sea for its salt. We find shade under the sycamores on the great avenues. Or we go to the rivers where water tells us modestly of its own sickness.
Sarah Hall

Art material

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 embarassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Jorge Luis Borges

The aesthetic event

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.
Jorge Luis Borges

Happy new year, a lot of luck to you all!

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Thomas Jefferson

Write it

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison

Clever

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
Oscar Wilde

I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.
Friedrich Nietzsche

People change and forget to tell each other.
Lillian Hellman

Happiness

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.
Jacques Prévert

Useful

It is truly useful since it is beautiful.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The biggest loss

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.

Søren Kierkegaard

Drawing and talking

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.

Le Corbusier

A happy change

We are not the same person this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy change if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

W. Somerset Maugham

I am happy to announce that the Quoted Images Imaged Quotes blog is back, check it out.

Books

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.
Stephen King

Love is not all

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St Vincent Millay

German version of Carpe diem

Nothing is worth more than this day.
Goethe

Hope

Hope is the dream of a waking man.
Aristotle

..And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey..

William Butler Yeats

Books went on living

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Marina Tsvetaeva

Like the gnawing of a mouse

...
Love has gone and left me, — and the neighbors knock and borrow,
And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse, —
And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
There's this little street and this little house.

Edna St Vincent Millay, from Ashes of Life