Kira's Favorite Quotes

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
-- Alan Kay

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein

There are a finite number of irreplaceable hours in a human life and it makes sense to fill those limited hours with as much remarkable experience as possible.
-- Steve Swink

The intrinsic path to success is to focus on being the person that you are, and put all of your energy and drive into being the best possible version of yourself.
-- Paul Buchheit

A free society means everyone has to be free, not just people you like.
-- Malor on Metafilter

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
-- Henry David Thoreau

Everyone is going to face challenges. What defines you is how you overcome those.
-- JR Celski

Did you do every single thing you could today, to be your best?
-- Apolo Ohno

When you are young, you worry about what people think of you.
When you are middle aged, you don't worry about what people think of you.
When you're old, you realize nobody was ever thinking about you anyway.
-- Miss Cellania

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.
-- Henry David Thoreau

You only live once. Go for it.
-- Hey Cupcake!

Regrets cannot change the past nor can they change the future. Learn from mistakes, forgive yourself, and live the best life you can live. It's the only one you get.
-- If I Had To Do It All Again...

When you can give without expecting anything in return, you have mastered the art of living.
-- Jonathan Mead

Can you keep secrets? Can you know a thing and never say it again?
-- The DaVinci Code

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
-- Michael Porter

That is what building a body of work is all about - it's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star - because one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative; it deepens and expands with each day that you give your best, and give back, and contribute...
-- Barack Obama

Just because you don't know your direction doesn't mean you don't have one.
-- Battlestar Galactica

How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.
-- Frodo, in The Return of the King

Stop waiting for happiness. Happiness is right here, right now.
-- Leo Babuta, Zen Habits

What if there is no one? What if you live your whole life, and no one is waiting?
-- The Lake House

How much of human life is lost in waiting?
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We're conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware - beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.
-- Kent Nerburn

The step from being a member of the protected American mainstream to being a marginalized outsider, not entitled to the protection of law enforcement and fair prey to any violent, flag-waving bully who happened to pass, was to stand up and say you did not believe the Vietnam war was right.
-- Kent State, May 4, 1970: America Kills Its Children

We are not here merely to make a living. We are here to enrich the world.
-- Woodrow Wilson

There are things machines will never do. They cannot possess faith. They cannot commune with god. They cannot appreciate beauty. They cannot create art. If they ever learn these things, they won't have to destroy us. They'll be us.
-- The Sarah Connor Chronicles

It nice it happen to you. Like you come to the island and had a holiday. Sun didn't burn you red-red, just brown. You sleep and no mosquito eat you. But the truth is, it bound to happen if you stay long enough. So take that nice picture you got in your head home with you, but don't be fooled. We lonely here mostly too. If we lucky, maybe, we got some nice pictures to take with us.
-- Meet Joe Black

If you want to develop courage, then simply act courageously when it's called for. If you do something over and over again, you develop a habit. Some people develop the habit of courage. Some people develop the habit of non-courage.
-- Brian Tracy

It's common to think things will never happen where you are--never in Cambridge, never in New York, never in Seattle--that sort of thing, whatever it is, never happens here, not in our community. Then it happens, right in front of you, and you realize you were blind to it, that you forgot that intolerance and zealotry and viciousness are human currency everywhere, and it takes your breath away.
-- Mike Daisey

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Politicians use lies to cover the truth up.
-- V for Vendetta

Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us.
-- V for Vendetta

I didn't know men could build such things.
-- Gladiator

What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.
-- Gretchen Rubin

If I made a list of all the things in life I thought were coincidences and then looked back at them, I would see that they weren't coincidences at all.
-- Harvey Jason

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have been and what we have become.
-- H. G. Wells

Great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves.
-- Paul Graham

When do you do things for the love of it? Always. If you're not feeling that, go do something else. Life is too short.
-- Raph Koster

Freedom is the right to choose. To have or to have not, to do or to do not.
-- unknown

Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.
-- Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Coolness is temporary. You can't capture it or create it, it has to be discovered. It has to do with the people that are in a place, not with monuments or institutions. It's a momentary conjunction of personalities.
-- Lawrence Wright

Your time is limited, so don't let it be wasted living someone else's life. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. You've got to find what you love. Do what you believe is great work. If you haven't found it, keep looking. Don't settle.
-- Steve Jobs

Remembering you are going to die is the best way to avoid the fear that you have something to lose.
-- Steve Jobs

Failure is not an option.
-- Gene Kranz, Apollo 13 Flight Director

You're a man who's haunted by those two most terrible words: What If?
-- Uber-Morlock in the Time Machine (2002)

Never save anything for a special occasion. Every day you're alive is a special occasion.
-- Ann Wells

Never think that war, no matter how necessary or how justified, is not a crime.
-- Ernest Hemingway

You cannot kill someone without killing a part of yourself.
-- quote from a soldier, Fahrenheit 9/11

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.
-- Sean Connery in First Knight

I will not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
---Frank Herbert's Dune

We had thought that we were human beings making a spiritual journey; it may be truer to say that we are spiritual beings making a human journey.
-- Teilhard de Chardin

What truly is logic? Who decides reason?
-- A Beautiful Mind

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice.
-- W J Bryan

Nobody can tell you if what you're doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.
-- Hugh MacLeod

Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what seperates successful people and failed people is time, effort and stamina.
-- Hugh MacLeod

You get as much out of your life as you're willing to put into it.
-- ?

Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the United States alone, we spend seven times as much on war as on education. There's something wrong there. On this Memorial Day, we should certainly honor those who have died at war, but we should dedicate this day, not so much to their memory, but to the search for a way to end the idiocy of the wars that killed them.
-- Andy Rooney, June 2004

America has never been innocent at all; it is not possible to call innocent a country where the original residents were systematically wiped out and the new tenants built a society in large part on the labor of people who were shipped over in chains from another continent.
-- American Weimar by Steve Erickson

To live life in every breath... every cup of tea... every life we take... that is bushido, the way of the warrior.
-- (Katsumoto) The Last Samurai

I have dreamed a dream... but now that dream is gone from me.
-- (Morpheus) Matrix: Reloaded

Most of us believe everyone has a right to his own opinion -- as long as it agrees with ours.
-- Andy Rooney

Where is the horse and rider?
Where is the horn that was blowing?
They have passed like rain on the mountains,
like wind in the meadow.
The days have gone down in the west
behind the hills, into shadow.
How did it come to this?
-- Theoden, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

I believe everyone is given some talent in life, and that talent is where you stand your best chance to make your way in the world.
-- Lesli Kathman

We create barriers for ourselves. We have our own mental barriers. And that keeps us from becoming all we can be, because we say "Well, I can't do that". But in the end... you can't do it unless you can imagine it. And you can't do it unless you can imagine yourself succeeding at it.
-- George Lucas

I find that smuggling is the life for me, and would be delighted to kill your friend the maggot.
-- The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

It's not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for.
-- Battlestar Galactica (2003)

It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.
-- Terminator 2

You don't have any friends. Nobody likes you.
-- Gollum, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

All wars are crimes.
-- The West Wing

It doesn't matter if most voters don't benefit. They all believe that someday they will. That's the problem with the American dream... it makes everyone concerned for the day they're gonna be rich.
-- The West Wing

At the end of your last day, what happened in the past doesn't matter. The only thing that will be in your heart are the things that really do matter, like your family.
-- Alex Solis

The War on Drugs may well be the most wasteful use of government resources today.
-- Dan Murphy

Look where you want to go... not where you're frightened to go.
-- ?

It's turning out that spending 20 years working with computers has been a really poor investment.
-- seen on Slashdot

Do not fear death... only the unlived life.
You don't have to live forever;
You just have to live.
-- Tuck Everlasting

There are no answers, only choices.
-- Solaris

There are such animals as stupid questions: it's okay to have to ask them once, but twice is once too often.
-- Grant Barrett

The proper answer to "Why do I need to know this?" is always, "Because."
-- Grant Barrett

Isn't everything we're doing in life a way to be loved a little more?
-- Before Sunrise

Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around again.
-- Vanilla Sky

I'll see you again in another life... when we are both cats.
-- Vanilla Sky

No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable.
-- John F. Kennedy

You are what you love... not what loves you.
-- Adaptation

Be careful what you pretend to be, because you will become that thing.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.
-- Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Happiness is not something you experience. It is something you remember.
-- Oscar Levant

You have eternity. I have only now.
-- Chani to Muad'dib, Children of Dune

For the truly creative mind in any field is no more than this - a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create - to create - to create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of beauty and meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create. He must pour out creation. By some strange unknown pressing inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
-- Pearl S. Buck

When you find yourself in the middle of your life
and you're nowhere near where you were going,
how do you find a way from the person you've become,
to the one you know you could've been?
-- Taken

People move through their lives sometimes without really thinking about where they're going. The days pile up, and they get sadder and lonelier, without really knowing how they got so sad, or why they're so lonely. Then something happens... they meet someone who looks a certain way, or has something in their smile. Maybe that's all that falling in love is. Finding someone who makes you feel a little less alone.
-- Taken

Sometimes people come to a moment where they think they've found that one last chance to be someone else... and they go for it. When it doesn't work out, they spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder at what might've been.
-- Taken

Life is 90% maintenance.
-- Taken

Regret is the worst of human emotions. There is no going back with regret. There is no future with regret. Regret is not something I live with. If there is something I wished I hadn't done, I don't do it anymore or I forgive myself and try better.

My life is my statement and I try to be true to myself and thusly to other people. Whatever my failings are, they are human and I try to perfect it each day.
-- William Shatner

The rapid progress of the sciences makes me sorry, at times, that I was born so soon. Imagine the power that man will have over matter, a few hundred years from now. We may learn how to remove gravity from large masses, and float them over great distances. Agriculture will double its produce with less labor. All diseases will surely be cured... even old age. If only the moral sciences could be improved as well. Perhaps men would cease to be wolves to one another... and human beings could learn to be human.
-- Benjamin Franklin

I think that humanity brings much misery on itself by the false value they put on things.
-- Benjamin Franklin

To make the journey and not fall deeply in love... well, you haven't lived a life at all. But you have to try... because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived.
-- Meet Joe Black

I think we should make cars that run on ketchup.
-- Josh Lyman in the West Wing

We all have our time machines. Those that take us back are memories. Those that take us forward are dreams...
-- Uber-Morlock in The Time Machine(2002)

Don't spend a lifetime of becoming good at something you don't love to do.
-- Famous Dave

People express greater satisfaction with irrevocable choices (like those made in an "all purchases final" sale) than with reversible choices (refunds or exchanges allowed). When feeling bound to something or someone, we're more likely to love it than when freer to contemplate alternatives.
-- Resolving the American Paradox, by David G. Myers

Now what? What do you do when the thing you wanted most... so perfect... just comes?
-- The Red Violin

You don't wanna be in love, you wanna be in love in a movie.
-- Sleepless In Seattle

You're an interesting species... an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams... and such horrible nightmares.
-- Contact

Who we are IS who we were.
-- Amistad

What was your favorite thing (about life)?
-- City of Angels

Some things are true whether you believe them or not.
-- City of Angels

God is what you love.
-- The Forge of God (Greg Bear)