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"The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course."
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"Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort."

"The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car."

"No matter. I was single, no children, a handful of plants and at 39, young enough to regroup. If I hit ground before I finished building my wings, I would not take anyone with me."

"If the sun needed friends to shine, it would not rule the sky alone."

"Any human being should be capable of three things to earn such title: live alone, hunt and drive anything with or without wheels. If you don't have these three things, you're either a slave or an animal. Any idea about being social or human has been cleverly associated with these two things, in order to make believe that being a social animal is the ideal to aspire for, especially if such animal is enslaved by a certain amount of ideals promoted by the system that gives him life and cuts it off as soon as he shows himself undeserving."

"Life is still better than University. In school, your teacher is the fruit picker and you are the open fruit basket. Then you take those fruits and make cakes and pies. But life is going to give you the chance to go out there and pick those fruits yourself. Then you can eat them, or make them into something else; any which way, your own hands picked them!"

"Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don't see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself."

"When you truly give up trying to be whole through others, you end up receiving what you always wanted from others."

"If you're not afraid of working hard, self-reliance comes easy!"
Explore more quotes by Michelangelo

"I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible."

"I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin's; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived."

"Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come."

"If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes."
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