Rosalia de Castro

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

All say, How hard it is that we have to die – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

Every mind has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

The possibility of stepping into a higher plane is quite real for everyone. It requires no force or effort or sacrifice. It involves little more than changing our ideas about what is normal.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Moms. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.