A few quotes to live by…

“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter 4,  Letters to a Young Poet

“We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can… if only we can arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien experience will become our most intimate and trusted experience.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The amateur trains until he gets it right; the professional trains until he gets it wrong.”
– Travis Haley, qtd. in The 4-Hour Chef

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment  The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness.”
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“It is within man’s power to love even those who sin against him. This becomes possible when one realizes that they are your brothers, that they wrong you unintentionally, or out of ignorance, that in a little while you and they will both be dead; and above all, that they have not really hurt you, so long as they have not sullied your conscience, or damaged your inner self by responding in kind.”
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We find it very unlikely.”
“So is winning the lottery, yet someone always wins.”
– Life of Pi

“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

“Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true.”
– Barack Obama, 2008 Inauguration

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger, but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
– Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince