Why Can’t People Just Be Nice?

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart. 
( Marcus Aurelius )

You are special.
Yes YOU.
The one reading this.

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence?
We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone? 
( Haruki Murakami )

Having plans sounds like a good idea.
Until you have to put on your clothes and leave the house.

When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you’re by yourself.
You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone. 
( Fiona Apple )

The greedy and the corrupt, and there are many, spoil our lives and are a curse we all have to bear.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.
( Donald Miller )

Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary. 
( Oscar Wilde )

The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.
( Maya Angelou )

People Will Never Forget How You Made Them Feel.
I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.
I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things – A rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.
I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life.
I’ve learned that making a “living” is not the same thing as making a “life.”
I’ve learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance.
I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands..
You need to be able to throw something back.
I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.
I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one.
I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone.
People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back.
I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did.
But people will never forget how you made them feel. 
( Maya Angelou )

One of the best lessons you can learn in life is to master how to remain calm.
( Rose Winfold )

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do.
I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too.
Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.
( Frida Kahlo )

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. 
( Plato )

There is emotion in the hug, and there is respect and a form of love.
Emotion that comes from honesty, respect that comes from challenge, and the form of love that exists between people whose minds have touched, whose hearts have touched, whose souls have touched.
Our minds touched, our hearts touched, our souls touched, we separate.
( James Frey )

Every moment of life is a gift.
Every good thing that happens to us is a blessing.
( Rose Winfold )

You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies.
Everyone has something good about them.
You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.
( Jeannette Walls )

I can’t really act the way I want to act, or say what I want to say all the time.
And a lot of times, I cover that up with a smile.
( Hilary Duff )

The only people who are mad at you for speaking the truth are those people who are living a lie.
Keep speaking the truth.
( Florence Emily Hookins )

Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone.
And do not be troubled about the future, for it has yet to come.
Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering.
( Ida Scott Taylor )

Walk with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground.
Let their spirit ignite a fire within you to leave this world better than when you found it.
( Wilferd Peterson )

To pay attention.
This is our endless and proper work.
( Mary Oliver )

It isn’t good to hold on too hard to the past.
You can’t spend your whole life looking back.
Not even when you can’t see what lies ahead.
All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be, even if it isn’t what you expected.
( Jim Butcher )

Open-minded people don’t care to be right, they care to understand.
There’s never a right or a wrong answer.
Everything is about understanding.
( Rose Winfold )

Do you wake up as I do?
Having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move?
There is a second of consciousness that is clean again.
A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world.
There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.
( Jeanette Winterson )

Communicate with, and keep company with, good people who make you see the world differently.
( Eileen Hutchison )

As We Venture Into The Murky Future.
Life has a way of going in circles.
Ideally, it would be a straight path forward.
We’d always know where we were going, we’d always be able to move on and leave everything else behind.
There would be nothing but the present and the future.
Instead, we always find ourselves where we started.
When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back.
We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We forget things we try to remember.
We remember things we’d rather forget.
We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important.
What defines us isn’t where we’re going, but where we’ve been.
Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are.
There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always.
But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind.
( Brigid Gorry-Hines )

We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.
( Karl Lagerfeld )

Have you ever gone out of your way to help someone and then find out how ungrateful they really are?
( Florence Emily Hookins )

Come clean with a child heart.
Laugh as peaches in the summer wind.
Let rain on a house roof be a song.
Let the writing on your face be a smell of apple orchards on late June.
( Carl Sandburg )

When the truth is uncomfortable, when the truth is unpopular, when the truth may even be dangerous, that is the precise time to speak the truth.
( Rose Winfold )

Everyone grieves in different ways.
For some, it could take longer or shorter.
I do know it never disappears.
An ember still smolders inside me.
Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.
( Maria V. Snyder )

It never gets easier, missing you.
And sometimes I wonder if it ever will.
( Heather Brewer )

What am I dying for?
( Stephenie Meyer )

When great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly.
Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
( Maya Angelou )

Whatever happens to your body, your soul will survive, untouched.
( J.K. Rowling )

We do not need to grieve for the dead.
Why should we grieve for them?
They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain.
They are home.
( John O’Donohue )

Our life is very short, and only a moment in time.
Our life is only important to those who love us, those who care for us, and those who depend on us.
( R S Hutchison )

I may be alive now, but in a series of moments I won’t be.
( Jarod Kintz )

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one.
No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow.
All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.
( Haruki Murakami )

Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him.
Wherever he goes, you also go.
He will not be alone.
( Jiddu Krishnamurti )

But long or short though life may be, tis nothing to eternity.
We part below to meet on high, where blissful ages never die.
( Emily Bronte )

One day I’ll have my appointment with death, and every day I call out to God to see if I can reschedule for a later date.
( Jarod Kintz )

Greed is responsible for almost all the misery and the suffering in the world today.
Our leaders, the corporations, and those with power, continue to put their greedy snouts deeper and deeper into the trough, and don’t give a shit about who, or what, they destroy.

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.
( Jim Carroll )

Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown.
But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality.
Dying is like being born, just a change.
( Isabel Allende )

Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn’t exist and never shall.
There is only now.
( Christopher Paolini )

I like living.
I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow.
But through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
( Agatha Christie )

Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become.
Do you believe in free speech?
Then speak freely.
Do you love the truth?
Then tell it.
Do you believe in an open society?
Then act in the open.
Do you believe in a decent and humane society?
Then behave decently and humanely.
( Adam Michnik )

The thing about our choices is that after we have made them, they turn around and make us.

I don’t fear failure.
I fear succeeding at something that doesn’t matter.
( Dan Erickson )

The wise don’t make a show of their knowledge.
But fools broadcast their foolishness.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
( Mother Teresa )

Do not chase people.
Be yourself and do your own thing and work hard.
The right people who belong in your life will come to you.

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
( Ralph Waldo Emerson )

Do not let the world make you hard.
Do not let the pain make you hate.
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.
Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.

To live a rich and abundant life, ask not what life can do for you, ask what you can do for the lives of others.
( Gary Amirault )

Every person from the past leaves a shadow in your mind, good or bad.
They all helped you write the story of your life and shaped the person you are today.

The biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done.
( John Galsworthy )

The loneliest people are the kindest.
The saddest people smile the brightest.
The most damaged people are the wisest.
All because they do not wish to see anyone else suffer the way they do.

One day your life will flash before your eyes.
Make sure it’s worth watching.
( Gerard Way )

It’s not how good you are.
It’s how good you want to be.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost.
When health is lost, something is lost.
When character is lost, all is lost.
( Billy Graham )

All big men are dreamers.
They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter’s evening.
Some of us let great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.

Happiness in life is not measured by the things we achieve, the places we go, or the route that we take to get there.
Happiness in life is measured by the people that we share all of our experiences with.
( Chris Needham )

Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many.
Not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
( Charles Dickens )