Beautiful people do not just happen.

“I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”

--Vincent Van Gogh

“For me, a woman who is absorbed in her work, who does not care about gaining one’s favor, strong yet subtle at the same time, is essentially more seductive. The more she hides and abandons her femininity, the more it emerges from the very heart of her existence.”

--Yohji Yamamoto

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

--Haruki Murakami

“But whereas a girl of nineteen draws her confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff. Desirous, she chooses her apéritifs wisely, or, content, she enjoys the caviare of potential power. Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. But on the landings of nineteen or twenty-nine she is pretty sure that there are no bears in the hall.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Tender is the Night'

“‎Close your eyes & imagine the best version of you possible. That’s who you really are, let go of any part of you that doesn’t believe it.”

--C. Assaad

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with a compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

--Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“You have to be different, great or first.”

--Loretta Lynn

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

--Humphrey Bogart

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

--John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'

“My love lacked passion, I seemingly ran circles in sentences trying to say what I couldn’t. I had not a brittle bone of romanticism in me… But all the impossible trying, the countless errors, they were the reasons he knew I loved him.”

--Georgia Whots

“There is no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

--Jack Welch, former CEO of GE

“Unless you have a feeling for that secret knowledge that modest things can be more beautiful than anything expensive, you will never have style.”

--Andrée Putman, French interior designer

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly… to listen to stars and buds, to babes and sages, with open heart; await occasions, hurry never… this is my symphony."

--William Henry Channing

Fearlessly be yourself.

“If there’s someone you absolutely miss, you might find yourself talking to them a lot in your mind, creating those fake conversations with them and you answer yourself in their voice in your head. Maybe it’s a girlfriend who dumped you or you know someone who died or that sort of thing, you adopt their personality or the memory of who they were as a means of staying close to them. People talk about spirit, but I have this idea that when we die, we’re gone. All that lives on is our memory and how we affected people, the way we changed people throughout our life. Whether you’ve had a good effect of a bad effect on people, that’s your afterlife—the people who live on after you.”

--Matt Berninger

“I need to rebel against myself. It’s the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.”

--Chuck Palahniuk

“There is only one you for all time. Fearlessly be yourself.”

--Anthony Rapp

“I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them.”

--Uma Thurman

“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”

--Joan Didion

“A prayer, for the wild at heart kept in cages.”

--Unknown

“Lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.”

--A tidbit from how to be alone

"Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world."

--Ray Eames

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."

--Pablo Picasso

“I don’t get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”

--Meg Rosoff, 'How I Live Now'

“Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything. They make you feel so alive that you’d follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix.”

--Karen Marie Moning

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

--Oscar Wilde

“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know - because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly… and when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Beautiful and Damned'

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

“A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.”

--Bette Davis

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running; that’s the way to live.”

--Jack Kerouac, 'The Dharma Bums'

“This morning, with her, having coffee.”

--Johnny Cash, when asked for his definition of paradise.

"Life is like a game of bridge -- only a dummy puts all her cards on the table."

--Florence Broadhurst

“Style for me is a casual way of putting something on. It’s not thought out but needs to suit your way of life. Now I like wearing the same sweater over and over again, then taking it off when it’s smelly.”

--Charlotte Gainsbourg