Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small people who find it easier to live in a world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it.

Wake Up Tiger

What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you do now.

Buddha

Saint Augustine declared that “the world is a book, and those who have not traveled have read only one page.” Only firsthand experience can validate or challenge our intuitions, giving us confidence about risky political decisions in a complex world of instant feedback loops and unintended consequences. During travel, perception and thought merge; a contradiction can emerge as a truth to be revealed, not some exception to be disproved. Such ambiguity is the corollary of complexity, after all. Reality is famously resistant to theories that measure the world according to what it should be rather than how it really is. Instead, exploring the patterns of the second world aesthetically, honoring the value of purely sensory judgments — this exposes characteristics that are common to the entire second world; differences are revealed to be more relative than absolute.

Parag Khanna, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008)

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.

Will Smith

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

Edit: While this still remains one of my favorite quotes, it turns our that the attribution of the quote cannot be verified to be Mark Twain. Whoever it may of been, it’s still a beautiful quote.

People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. What we seek is an experience of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Mark Twain

This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in they life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself – and thus make yourself indispensable.

Andre Gide (French Writer)

Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he’s also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh… he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, ‘cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn’t learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you’re 18… Ah, think of the suffering you’re gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don’t get better suffering than that.

Frank, Little Miss Sunshine