I put together some quotes that have come to be like a mantra for me.
"A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light."
- Leonardo da Vinci
“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
- William S. Burroughs
“When your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.”
- Chuck Palahniuk
"Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born."
- William S. Burroughs
"If [you] wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, [you] shall never begin."
- Ivan Turgenev
"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
- George Bernard Shaw
“Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."
- Hans Christian Andersen
“If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.”
- Chuck Palahniuk
“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“If you want to get to the peak, you ought
To climb without giving it too much thought.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
- Epictetus
“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre
"Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream."
- Nikki Sixx
“Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
- John Watson
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
- Aristoteles / Will Durant
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
- Salvador Dali
"Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it."
- Maya Angelou
"Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali [insert appropriate name
]"
- Salvador Dali