Favorite Quotes

I am inspired by different people on a daily basis. Sometimes all it takes is a witty phrase or a line of poetry. Sometimes I need inspiration to write and other times I just need to be reconnected with the struggle of life via Edgar Allan Poe. Here are some of my favorite quotes that I return to all the time:

"Ipsa scientia potestas est." ("Knowledge itself is power.")
~Sir Francis Bacon

"You read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored."
~Howard Zinn

"I delight in detesting. And love loving so much after that."
~Laure-Anne Bosselaar

"Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit both these things, we might be less apt to destroy both."
~Christian Wiman

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair. The sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page."
~Stephen King

"It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction."
~Pablo Picasso

"There is no end. There is only the infinite passion of life."
~Federico Fellini

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
~Henry David Thoreau

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
~Franz Kafka

"The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak."
~FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

"Let's start with first things first: passion ... Because the fact is, you're never going to be able to lead others effectively unless you put your whole heart into what you're doing." ~Bo

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
~Pablo Picasso

"The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
~Bernard Malamud

"Never to suffer would never to have been blessed."
~Edgar Allan Poe

"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality."
~Edgar Allan Poe

"Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it."
~Joseph Conrad

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
~Mark Twain

"You must let your poems ride their luck
On the back of the sharp morning air
Touched with the fragrance of mint and thyme ...
And everything else is Literature."
~ Paul Verlaine, poet