There are so many things that can get one’s thinking wheels running. If you think about it, ‘thinking’ opens your thought processes. You become so much more aware of your surroundings and learn to question things. What happens in the process is that you make your mind work.
The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.
― Henry Miller
“The path to true education comes from thinking and asking questions”.
This was the idiom my high school teacher used to go by. Never accepting anything at face value and trying to go to the roots of a particular subject, was the lesson she gave all her students. My favorite activity to set the mind wheels rolling is to read some thought-provoking quotes. It is so much like solving a crossword puzzle or trying your hands at Sudoku.
In the following sections of this Quotabulary article, we will present to you a compilation of some of the thought-provoking quotes that deal with varied subject matters like God, love, life, and friendship.
Quotes about Love
“It is impossible to love and be wise.”
― Francis Bacon
“The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.”
― William Somerset Maugham
“One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.”
― James Earl Jones
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― James Arthur Baldwin
“Love comes unseen; we only see it go.”
― Austin Dobson
“Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.”
― Swedish Proverb
“I don’t want to live. I want to love first and live incidentally.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald
“Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is.”
― Gary Zukav
“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
― Kahlil Gibran
“There is love of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.”
― Jean Anouilh
“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.”
― James M. Barrie
“Love: Two minds without a single thought.”
― Philip Barry
“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”
― G. K. Chesterton
“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”
― Charles M. Schulz
“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato
“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
― Tom Robbins
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
― David Henry Thoreau
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
― Gautama Buddha
Quotes on Friendship
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.”
― Baltasar Gracian
“It takes a long time to grow an old friend.”
― John Leonard
“It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”
― Marlene Dietrich
“A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.”
― Elbert Hubbard
“A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.”
― Arnold Glasow
“Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.”
― Dag Hammarskjold
“I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.”
― Katherine Mansfield
“I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
― Plutarch
“The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.”
― Jay McInerney
“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”
― Barbara Kingsolver
“So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.”
― Sir Francis Bacon
“A friend can tell you things you don’t want to tell yourself.”
― Frances Ward Weller
“A friend is one who walks in when others walk out.”
― Walter Winchell
“You know a real friend? Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.”
― William S. Burroughs
Quotes about God
“So great are the effectiveness and power of the Word of God that the more it is persecuted the more it flourishes and grows.”
― Martin Luther
“God made (human beings) because he loves stories.”
― Elie Wiesel
“God is in the details.”
― Unknown
“Lord, when we are wrong, make us willing to change, and when we are right, make us easy to live with.”
― Peter Marshall
“Lord, when we are wrong, make us willing to change, and when we are right, make us easy to live with.”
― Peter Marshall
“God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.”
― Pablo Picasso
“How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones.”
― Samuel Beckett
“If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”
― Jewish Proverb
“I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“God is only a great imaginative experience.”
― D.H. Lawrence
“God doesn’t require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.”
― Mother Teresa
“While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.”
― Maya Angelou
“We are never defeated unless we give up on God.”
― Ronald Regan
“If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society, He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.”
― Zig Ziglar
“Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.”
― Albert Einstein
“God must love the common man, he made so many of them.”
― Abraham Lincoln
“God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.”
― William Shakespeare
“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”
― C.S. Lewis
“But for my faith in God, I should have been a raving maniac.”
― Mohandas Gandhi
Quotes about Life
“You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
― Navajo Proverb
“The obstacle is the path.”
― Zen Proverb
“When the pain is great enough, we will let anyone be doctor.”
― Mignon McLaughlin
“It’s always Now.”
― Eckhart Tolle
“To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.”
― Stanislaus I
“Only those who care about you can hear you when you’re quiet.”
― Unknown
“When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to view everything as a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow
“All things are difficult before they are easy.”
― Thomas Fuller
“Not everyone thinks the way you think,
knows the things you know,
believes the things you believe,
nor acts the way you would act.
Remember this and you will go a long way in getting along with people.”
― Arthur Forman