“My mom had me at 16 and took me every place she went. I remember going on peace marches. She tried to take me to Woodstock – it was pouring rain. It was on my birthday, and I was crying so much in the car they turned the car around and dumped me at my grandmother’s house… I had a little attitude.”
— Debi Mazar
“Watch your manner of speech if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful.”
— Norman Vincent Peale
“My attitude to peace is rather based on the Burmese definition of peace – it really means removing all the negative factors that destroy peace in this world. So peace does not mean just putting an end to violence or to war, but to all other factors that threaten peace, such as discrimination, such as inequality, poverty.”
— Aung San Suu Kyi
“Chaotic people often have chaotic lives, and I think they create that. But if you try and have an inner peace and a positive attitude, I think you attract that.”
— Imelda Staunton
“Every child’s taste is different. Don’t worry if they’re not reading ‘War and Peace’ at age 12. First, build a good foundation and a positive attitude about reading by letting them pick the stories they enjoy. Make friends with a bookseller or librarian. They are a wealth of information on finding books that kids enjoy.”
— Rick Riordan
“If you can’t pay for a thing, don’t buy it. If you can’t get paid for it, don’t sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don’t wait for time.”
— Ernst Fischer
“There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.”
— Phil Knight
“Peaceful, lawful protest – if it is effective – is innately disruptive of ‘business as usual.’ That is why it is effective.”
— Naomi Wolf
“To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes – to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute. There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth — and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.”
— Alden Bell
“Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.”
— Grenville Kleiser
“It was only too bad that to gossip and support mean ideas was easier and more enjoyable, really, than to keep quiet and know in silence that the true story can never be told, articulated in a way that will tell the whole truth. Even if it is better to be quiet, quietness will never reign. People talked, even the best of them.”
— Amanda Coplin
“A peaceful refuge in which to rediscover each other, we thought,, not realizing that, while golf and fishing are Scotland’s most popular outdoor sports, gossip is the most popular indoor sport.”
— Diana Gabaldon
“I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured.”
— President James A. Garfield
“Even as individuals become families and families become communities, and communities become nations, so eventually must the nations draw together in peace.”
— Marjorie Watts
“Mon cher docteur! Do you not think I know the female mentality? The village gossip, it is based always, always on the relations of the sexes. If a man poisons his wife in order to travel to the North Pole or to enjoy the peace of a bachelor existence—it would not interest his fellow-villagers for a minute!”
— Agatha Christie
“Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
— Nate Silver
“Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it”
— Alfred Whitney Griswold
“There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”
— Joan Didion
“Regrets are particularly poignant for the old, those of us who have used up most of the chances we’ll ever get and are left to make peace with our failed choices. Most things distance themselves with space and time to eventually slide off the edge of our consciousness, but not regrets. You can shove them aside, disavow them for a lifetime, but they always return. And the longer you deny them, the more they punish you when they can no longer be held at bay.”
— Lionel Fisher
“It’s amazing how long we put up with things we detest for the sake of a quiet life.”
— Tami Egonu
“Of course the people in the metro didn’t see a thing!…what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they’ll still come out to refute me! make claims!…that nothing got bombed!…squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, there’s no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! it’s all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in…and dancing purple fireflies…”
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline
“Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.”
— Ayn Rand
“I had forgotten how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city is, there’s a stillness to it, a peace that lures you in. In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.All along the Seine, street lamps come on, apartment windows turn golden.”It’s seven,” Julien says, and I realize that he has been keeping time all along, waiting. He is so American. No sitting idle, forgetting oneself, not for this young man of mine.”
— Kristin Hannah
“She throws her jeans at me and dives into the pellucid lake, slicing through the water almost without a splash. A church bell rings out in the distance, echoing in the quiet aftermath of Everly’s quick jump into the unexpected.”
— Rebecca Paula
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
“Why should I blame her that she filled my daysWith misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire?What could have made her peaceful with a mindThat nobleness made simple as a fire,With beauty like a tightened bow, a kindThat is not natural in an age like thisBeing high and solitary and most stern?Why, what could she have done, being what she is?Was there another Troy for her to burn?”
— W.B. Yeats
“I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”
— Malcolm X
“Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she’d wanted to find in words the peace and safety that life hadn’t wanted to grant her.”
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“What did Saturday’s used to taste like? Like eggs and fried ham and the bitter smell of hair in heavy rollers. Like long quiet hours and making up after a fight. Like ointment and bruising. Like waiting, especially, for something – anything – to happen.”
— Lauren Oliver
“It was the kind of terrified look that reminds you that no matter how rational or grown up a person might seem, some part of him is absolutely sure – knows – that an evil other-world exists just outside of our regular, everyday world. And that although we don’t expect that world to collide with our calm, predictable one…well, really, at any moment that is exactly what might happen.”
— Ann M. Martin