Mel Brooks, The 2000 Year Old Man

We mock the things we are to be.

Georgia O'Keefe, The Complete Correspondence

I do not like the idea of happiness — it is too momentary. I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.

Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

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.

Viktor Frankl

What is to give light must endure burning.

Ada Limon

People have done this before, but not us.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times.

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

What we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how.

Paris Hilton on Twitter 2018

If you're not having fun then just leave.