I call the right axe Sorrow, " she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.

When we truly are putting others first, we cannot but feel at peace with ourselves.

Time is a precious thing. Never waste it.

Since my life as a prisoner has begun I have heard the teachings of the white man's religion, and in many respects believe it to be better than the religion of my fathers

Take care of yourselves, and each other.

Most people didn't pursue their passions simply because of the promise of a paycheck. They pursued them because they couldn't imagine doing anything else with their lives.

Most Kikuyu marriages were arranged on the basis of what is described by anthropologists as the bride price.

I think all the poets and artists have always written for peace and love, and it hasn’t changed much in the last two or three thousand years. But we hope.

Wisdom is a living stream, not an icon to be preserved in a museum. Only when a practitioner finds the spring of wisdom in his or her own life can it flow to a future generation

Now we all know that Fidel Castro dressed up like Marilyn Monroe and gave JFK a case of syphilis so bad it eventually blew out the back of his head.