24 pieces of wisdom for 24/1/24

I collect quotations to give me something to hang on to when I'm feeling blue. Here are 24 of my favourites for the 24th of the month.

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

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I read something the other day about stories being like spells with the power to transform, just like magic. For me, wise quotations also have the power to transform my mood, my thoughts, and my ideas. I collect quotations whenever I can and store them away for winter, when everything can feel a little cold and dead and I seek out comfort and warmth. Here are some of my favourite quotations.

1. “You're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” AA Milne

2. “When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” John Lennon

3. “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” Chinese proverb

4. “You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them.” Shonda Rhimes

5. “One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.” Michelle Obama

6. “Happiness is not something readymade; it comes from your own actions.” The Dalai Lama

7. “It has always been easy to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult.” Queen Elizabeth

8. “The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.” Barack Obama

9. “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.” Rita Emmett

10. “We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.” Thich Nhat Hanh

11. “Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are.” Anne Lamott

12. “I’m choosing happiness over suffering; I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.” Elizabeth Gilbert

13. “You have trust in what you think. If you splinter yourself and try to please everyone, you can’t.” Annie Leibovitz

14. “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Nelson Mandela

15. “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” J.K. Rowling

16. “Success is loving life and daring to live it.” Maya Angelou

17. “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” Pema Chodron

18. “And the day came when the risk of remaining tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anaïs Nin

19. “Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” Farrah Gray

20. If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.” Anna Quindlen

21. “Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.” Dalai Lama

22. “Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, more money, in order to do more of what they want so they will be happier. The way it works is reversed. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do in order to have what you want.” Margaret Young

23. “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story.” Cheryl Strayed

24. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said and what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou