Written by Quotes and Hope for Our Future
During these troubled days, it’s hard to remain positive. Deeply concerned by the war in Ukraine and the turmoil at our border, I pray for people’s safety and hope for a way out of this madness. The world is changing faster than my mind can comprehend, and I’m looking for meaning, I search for hope. I’ve always liked to read famous quotes, looking for insight from wiser people while navigating this life. I’ve listed some here, an eclectic group whom I have read and enjoyed. Here’s hoping that they soothe you during these troubled times. KEEP WRITING!
“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“While there’s life, there’s hope.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke
“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write .”
― John Adams, The Works Of John Adams, Second President Of The United States
“The happiness of society is the end of government.”
― John Adams
“Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.I’ve heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”
― T.S. Eliot
“Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.”
― Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
“When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf
“I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.”
― Pearl S. Buck
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner
“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
“Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase.”
“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: “Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
― Robert F. Kennedy
“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
― Howard Zinn
“There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968
“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
“Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”
― Mother Teresa
“My hope still is to leave the world a bit better than when I got here.”
― Jim Henson
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).”
“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”
“The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.”
“It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself,”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“… common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong.”
― George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
“Get going. Move forward. Aim High. Plan a takeoff. Don’t just sit on the runway and hope someone will come along and push the airplane. It simply won’t happen. Change your attitude and gain some altitude. Believe me, you’ll love it up here.”
― Donald Trump
“To hear the phrase “our only hope” always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn’t work, there is nothing left.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book
“All cannot be lost when there is still so much being found”
― Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)
“I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.”
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
