I love quotes. I collect them the way some people collect stamps, or coins, or antique watches. I have old journals filled with quotes rather than what I did with my days.

Today’s blog challenge is to list your favorite quotes and that’s really difficult for me, so I’m going to give you my top 15: the ones that make me think, the ones that make me dream, the ones which comfort me, the ones which depress me. Here goes.

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved by have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists…it is real…it is possible…it is yours.”
-Ayn Rand

 

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them.”
— Ray Bradbury

 

“What if evil doesn’t really exist?
What if evil is something dreamed up by man
and there is nothing to struggle against except our own limitations?
The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?”
-Libba Bray

 

“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.”
— Ray Bradbury

 

“It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless. ”
-Donald  Miller

“Words have value, but only in terms of their meaning. Meaning is constantly seeking to express what cannot be said in words and thus passed on…So we look at things, but it is only an outward form and color and what can be heard is just the name and sound. How sad that this generation imagines that the form, color, name and sound are enough to capture the essence of something! The form, color, name and sound are in no way sufficient to capture or convey the truth.”
– Chuang Tzu

 

“It isn’t sufficient just to want – you’ve got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

“Love can come when you’re already who you are, when you’re filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.”
— Deb Caletti

 

“I craved total freedom and I envied boys because I thought the could have it. But there was a way in which, as a girl, I could act free but never quite get there in my head. However many expectations I escaped and constraints I threw off, there would always be that nagging caution at the back of my head that said I’d better lock the door.”
-Elisabeth Eaves

 

“Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.”
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“It starts so young, and I’m angry about that. The garbage we’re taught. About love, about what’s “romantic.” Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys–depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We don’t know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.”
— Deb Caletti

 

“Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It is a book written from the underside of power. It’s an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.

This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures.”
― Rob Bell

 

“The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is ‘Do not fear.’ It’s in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn’t let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”
— Donald Miller

 

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
— Mitch Albom

 

“We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it’s easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found.”
— Cecelia Ahern