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