Thursday, April 30, 2009

James Matthew Barrie


1. “A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.”
2. “Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.”
3. “Ambition is the last infirmity of noble minds.”
4. “As soon as you can say what you think, and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on your way to being a remarkable man.”
5. "Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."
6. “Every time a child says, "I don't believe in fairies," there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”
7. "Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads."
8. “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
9. “If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.”
10. “I have always found that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.”
11. “I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.”
12. “It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?”
13. "Let no one who loves be called unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow."
14. “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.”
15. “The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.”
16. “The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.”
17. “Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.”
18. “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
19. "We are all failures—at least, all the best of us are."
20. “What is algebra exactly; is it those three-cornered things?”
21. “When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one.”
22. “You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.”