The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn't be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead

In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Merely based on the fact that nobody questions periods, nobody talks about periods, it could be the perfect excuse to use in a pickle.

Human conditions are merely a part of the illusory, dreamlike nature of our body/mind/personality's functioning. Meditation renders those conditions powerless. If only for a moment. If those moments come more and more frequently, the conditions become less and less powerful.

It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

2. "Creating #Change in Leadership is not merely about the brilliance or fineness of intellectual propositions, but rather about; The #Sincerity of the leader and his #Intrinsic resolve to lend himself #wholly to the course in spite of the natural lure for ease and pleasure; It is about preserving the #Fervor and #Spirit of the collectively shared #Vision through accepting #Obligations that may sometimes disrupt personal liberty and comfort; It is about speaking through sweat drenched #Commitment and accomplishments rather than rationalizing indolence; It is about a religious devotion to the greater #Us, as against the "I", "Me" or "Myself"... You may walk like #Cambridge, look like #Harvard and speak like the #Whitehouse, if you don't have these fine character traits, you won't be able to chase a fly out of a toilet; for suits don't change anything, but people with a #Heart do

If we are not growing, we are merely existing.

For if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

You are not here merely to making a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.

The Imagination merely enables us to wander into the darkness of the unknown where, by the dim light of the knowledge we carry, we may glimpse something that seems of interest. But when we bring it out and examine it more closely it usually proves to be only trash whose glitter had caught our attention. Imagination is at once the source of all hope and Inspirational but also of frustration. To forget this is to court despair.

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song ? if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests

The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart.

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

That was one of the inherent flaws of faith. Belief without knowing. But worse yet: belief without action. It could be good in its own right. Beautiful, even, when embraced, but that had to be measured. Checked. Too many surrendered themselves to it. What they did not see was simple fact. Religion did not bring peace. It merely offered a means. It was up to man to create peace.

Without attachment, a naked body is merely a lifeless sex-toy.

The master of the garden is the one who waters it, trims the branches, plants the seeds, and pulls the weeds. If you merely stroll through the garden, you are but an acolyte.