It always makes me sad when I think of how I saw Wagner wasting his vitality, not only by singing their parts to some of his artists, but acting out the smallest details, and of how few they were who were responsive to his wishes.

Give us that grand word woman once again, and let's have done with lady; one's a term full of fine force, strong, beautiful, and firm, fit for the noblest use of tongue or pen; and one's a word for lackeys.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

As far as self-confidence goes, so much of social media is about approval, getting likes, comparing our lives to others' - meanwhile, confidence is an inside job: it's about how you feel about yourself regardless of what anyone else does or thinks. It's a knowing that you're human, you're flawed, and you're awesome in your own way.

Jen Sincero

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whoever is trying to bring you down is already beneath you.

Habeeb Akande

Every problem is a gift - without problems we would not grow.

Anthony Robbins

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Henri Matisse

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

Graham Greene

The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery, and the only thing you need to recover from is a fractured sense of self.

Marianne Williamson

Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.

Victor Hugo

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

Carl Rogers

Conversion is not my intention. Changing religion is not easy. You may develop some kind of confusion or difficulties.

Dalai Lama

He broke me down past the flesh, past the muscle, past the bone, down to my soul and in a loud provocation, he asked, What are you made of?After I gathered the broken bits and pieces of my life together, I shouted at the top of my lungs, HOPE! Unbreakable, undeniable, irrevocable hope!

Jay Grewal