"Quotations"

I love quotations. They're exactly what I want to say, but don't have the words to. The best part? There is a quote for everything. Somebody in the past has already thought what you are thinking now. They went to another level and said it. This is amazing, as it ties the present to the past. It will someday tie the future to the present, which will tie it back to the past. That might take sometime to comprehend, but once you do it’ll make sense. I promise. I can spend hours and hours reading quotes. One quote can mean different things to different people. Here are a few quotes I like, in no specific order:

1. “I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.'' Jeffrey Eugenides

It's incredible to think that people are doing things with their lives every second of everyday. The world is consisted of billions of little lives growing and changing all the time. This is gone unnoticed by most of us most of the time. However, once you ponder upon this musing it's inconceivable. For the first time, you are not the only one that matters. You are not the only one who has a life, everybody does. It's a mind-blowing observation, Mr. Jeffrey Eugenides, mind-blowing. 

2.“You know what I think we are most afraid of? Not knowing. Not knowing whether it’s all really worth it. Not knowing if you should give up or keep fighting. Not knowing why you do things you do; not knowing the purpose. It’s like when you’re little and you touch the stove and get burned, because you didn’t really know that it was hot. Not knowing has always hurt us, from the very beginning.”

All humans have the same bad habit. They are too curious. They need to know everything about anything. Not knowing something makes us feel lost and stupid. These are not feelings we appreciate. Too many options have hurt human kind from the beginning, because we do not know which is the right one to choose. We’ve figured out that if we know everything, then we can indirectly be in control of it all. If we are in control of anything and everything, then nothing can ever harm us. That’s why scientist’s jobs are to experiment, experiment, and experiment. They’re trying to find out what the rest of us don’t already know, so human kind never has to get hurt.

3. “You know that feeling, when you're reading a book, and there's a line in it so awesome you re-read it again and again; because you love it so much you just want to reach out and touch it, but the best you can do is read it until you can almost taste it on your tongue?”

If you love to read as much as I do, you know this feeling like the back of your hand. That might not be the best metaphor though, as how many of us spend hours staring at our own hands? Anyway, this tends to happen to me very frequently. When you read a book, a certain word or phrase jumps out you sometimes. You can relate to or you want to be able to relate to it someday so much that you read those words over and over again trying to get them within you. Then you stop reading and just think about those words. That’s the moment you realize how important and fragile these words are. So simple, yet they explain everything. This, people is the magic of words.
4. “Settle? You said ‘settle’. Settle for anything and you’re doomed. My biggest fear in life is being mediocre. We can’t be willing to settle for anything, especially for less than we deserve. We watch other people live out their dreams; instead of invest in dreams of our own. We should strive for greatness, for life is too short. We must make it extraordinary and never settle for anything less than extraordinary or else…life would suck. It might suck anyway, but it’s better to suck with integrity, right?”

—

Frankie

The meaning of this quote is obvious. We can’t settle for anything. We should always be wanting, striving, achieving. It contradicts to what Buddha says about happiness. He says cut off the desire from your life. This is true, but wouldn’t you want to live and be adventurous before you do this? Settling is for the middle-aged. When we get there, we’ll settle. However right now, we shouldn’t settle for anything. We should be reachers, not settlers. We must have enough dignity to do this. Sometimes, we must have enough dignity and self worth to walk away from people or places that are important to us but take away our happiness. As actions speak louder than words, we must not only think great, extravagant thoughts but we must follow those thoughts with actions. That I believe might also be the facts behind the saying, YOLO (You only live once). Yolo, so live with integrity and adventure. Don’t settle, reach.
5. ‘You must love your crooked neighbor, with all your crooked heart.’ –W.H Auden

I find this quote immensely beautiful. None of us are perfect, thus we must accept each other with all of the flaws included. The word ‘neighbor’ here does not only refer to the person living next to you, it refers to anybody you know well. Your neighbor might be filled with flaws and shortcoming, but so are you. Your heart too is crooked. Thus, you must accept anybody and everybody as they should accept you.
6. "I'm in love with cities I've never been to and people I’ve never met."
This is literally my life. I’m always hoping that my future brings things better than my present. I imagine living in the greatest cities in the world. London, Paris, New York, Moscow, Athens, Rio and all the rest, they consume most of my thoughts. They are the bases of my imagination. The people I have never met go right along with them. People who get my weird sense of humor, and can make me laugh till I can’t breath. Right now, most of the people I know are on the chuckling level. These are the people that I can have a conversation with about nothing and anything at the same time. The ones that can talk about deep, meaningful things one minute and go off on a snarky, sarcastic rant in the next. The folks who are not ashamed of dancing randomly but also enjoy sitting in comfortable silence. I dream of these places and these people I have never known. They are nothing but a sliver of my imagination, yet they mean the world to me. Although I might be a little hopeful, I know I’ll go to these cities and meet these people one day.

7. 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God.” –John Green

I love this quote because of the truth in it. Many people claim they believe in and love God, I doubt this. All these people are just following the so-called rules of religion. By doing this, they hope that good things will happen to them later. Maybe if they don’t sin now, later they’ll go to heaven and be gifted with women. Maybe if they don’t swear, surely God will send them to heaven and give them everything their hearts desire. They won’t yell at somebody they don’t like because they’re scared of going to Hell. Honestly, those people are crazy. They’re commercializing God. They’re making it seem as if God is blackmailing them. Guess what? I believe in the Gods. However I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. How can God, who has so much faith in you, manipulate you? I believe in Karma. I believe that everybody should be nice to everybody else because they exist. I believe in the reasoning that everything happens for a reason. I don’t think that we should be good people because we’ll get prizes from God later. That’s a horrendous way of thinking.

8. “There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.”

― John Green, Looking for Alaska

And this one, as I take away the same thing from both of them.
“I believe that what we get out of life is what we've set ourselves up to get, so there's no such thing as an inconsequential decision. Our destinies are the culmination of all the choices we've made along the way, which is why it's imperative to listen hard to your inner voice when it speaks up.

Don't let anyone else's noise drown it out.”

― Megan McCafferty, Second Helpings

“But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless”. This is basically the most important fact of life. We do little things everyday that we don’t give a second thought to. These things eventually add up. Every single thing we do eventually adds up into what and who we will be in the future. We don’t understand what is happening when it’s happening. However, if we turn around and look in to the past we finally understand. Life is a teacher who teaches backwards. It takes the exam and then gives the notes. Another thing is, because everything matters so much we must listen to ourselves. We must not blindly follow the actions of others; if we do they will affect us later. We must think with our head and listen to our inner voice. Don’t let anybody else change the way you think, unless it’s for the better.
9. “Maybe these are my glory days and I’m not even realizing it because they don’t involve a ball.” –The Perks of Being a Wallflower
When we look at famous people, specifically sports stars we are amazed. We see them running around or swimming on national television, with the whole world watching them succeed. We know for a fact that these are their glory days. These are the days that they’re going to tell their grand children about. These are days they will forever remember. Then we think, when are our glory days coming? We spend so much time thinking about this, that we might not even notice when our glory days come and go. Why? This is because everybody’s glory days are different. We all have different talents. We all will succeed in different fields. Sometimes, those fields don’t include a ball. And that’s okay.

10. “My thoughts create my world.” -Marcus Flutie from Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts

My thoughts create my world. Your thoughts create your world. His thoughts create his world. The thoughts we think, consciously and unconsciously, create our world. They shape our perspective on how we see the world. We all see things, hear things, and feel things differently. This is because of our thoughts. Every thought we have results into how we feel about one thing or another. Our thoughts are our world, for they created it. Perspective is how we see the world. Thoughts are directly proportional to perspective. Thus our whole world is created my things we think.