Something Rare Quotes & Sayings

I don't trust art that promises a 24-hour joyride. In fact, there seems to be a modern sense of entitlement for such constant "ups," which is a repugnant attitude any way one chooses to look at it. I definitely believe in the possibility of happiness, though; it's just something that I think, rightfully, is rare in its genuine form, and that it can't be counterfeited. — Chris Ware

Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all? — Henry David Thoreau

There were a lot of botched kills throughout the eastern part of Kentucky when the work fell outside his control. Six or seven years ago, a man from Perry County was shot point blank in the head and left for dead in the middle of downtown. Problem was, the bullet had traveled between the man's scalp and his skull halfway across his head and exited the same way it had entered on the other side. The whole thing had left him with only fingernail-sized contusions on both sides of his head. He identified the guy who shot him and saw him arrested and convicted of attempted murder.
Now, it's true that a situation like that was a rare one, but part of doing a job right was minimizing the chance for something to go wrong. — Sheldon Lee Compton

One thing is clear, the president of North Vietnam is not a fanatic. He is a very strong and determined man, but capable of listening, something that is very rare in a person of his position. — Martin Niemoller

Friendship, as far as I'm concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that's built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and share commitments. It's a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It's something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally. — Chris Kraus

I took a moment to savor the sensation of impending disastor before telling it to get lost.
"Things are pretty messed up right about now," I began. "What started as a weird phenomenon, something rare, is quickly building into what we might affectionately call 'the Apocalypse. — Lia Habel

He was curious to know more about her. So he did something extremely rare. He sent her a note. Even more shocking, he suggested they meet. In person. Two people from different kingdoms - who are engaged to be married. Crazy, I know. — Christopher Healy

A stew of potatoes, kidney beans, and chopped greens and onions simmered atop the small cast-iron range. The appetizing scent filled the cottage and drifted out the open windows. Remembering the many times she had made the dish for her father, Victoria smiled wistfully. Her father had never been a great lover of food, regarding it solely as a necessity for the body rather than something to be enjoyed. On the rare occasions when Victoria had made plum pudding, or brought currant buns from the bakery, he had nibbled at the treats and quickly lost interest. The only times she had ever seen him eat heartily, and with obvious enjoyment, was when she had made vegetable stew. — Lisa Kleypas

Most of all, Violet will know the smile: a slow and confident widening of a too-abundant mouth. This woman is something more than beautiful, something alchemical, an unstable mixture of rare elements bound together by nerve and charm. Am I interrupting something dreadfully important? she asks, with the ironic warmth of a woman who knows in her bones that she is always the most important object in the room. — Beatriz Williams

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane. — Kevin Hearne

I absolutely fell in love with David Cristofanos writing. THE GIRL SHE USED TO BE is that rare novel
its the one youve been looking for when you wander the bookstore aisles, hoping to find something that will grab hold of you and not let go. Eloquent, haunting, and totally enthralling, I was swept in from page one. — Johanna Edwards

But history is that rare woman who doesn't like to look at herself in the mirror. History, when she finds herself in front of one, wipes and wipes its surface at though in this way she might change her face to something better — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. — Colson Whitehead

We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.. moments like these are not the passive, receptive, relaxing timesthe best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule. — Friedrich Nietzsche

People change us. It is a rare, if not an impossible occurrence, that we come out of relationships unscathed. In our dealings with people we take something with us and we leave something behind. Some people are haunted more than others, either by the sweet perfume of another or the stink of regret. — Donna Lynn Hope

Let me pull you close and whisper a heart-stopping truth. That daily stuff - those responsibilities that seem more like distractions - those things we want to rush and just get through to get on with the better and bigger assignments of life - those things that are unnoticed places of service? They are the very experiences from which we unlock the riches of wisdom. We've got to practice wisdom in the everyday places of our lives. Never despise the mundane. Embrace it. Unwrap it like a gift. And be one of the rare few who looks deeper than just the surface. See something more in the everyday. It's there. — Lysa TerKeurst

I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me. — Curtis Sittenfeld

But in our age of emptiness, tragedies are relatively rare. Or if they are written, the tragic aspect is the very fact that human life is so empty, as in Eugene O'Neill's drama, The Iceman Cometh. This play is set in a saloon, and its dramatis personae - alcoholics, prostitutes, and, as the chief character, a man who in the course of the play goes psychotic - can dimly recall the periods in their lives when they did believe in something. It is this echo of human dignity in a great void of emptiness that gives this drama the power to elicit the emotions of pity and terror of classical tragedy. — Rollo May

Roadblock #5: It's Unpredictable
By and large, human beings don't like surprises. I know that I don't. Okay, maybe I like that rare piece of unexpected good news or a letter from a friend or a thoughtful thank-you. But I'm willing to bet that people in funny hats jumping out of dark closets are responsible for more heart attacks than expressions of unbridled delight. When the doorbell rings late at night, I'm under no illusion that it's the Publisher's Clearing House Prize Patrol!
This, most likely, goes back to our caveman past when a big, exciting surprise was apt to be something like an 800-pound,snarling, saber-toothed tiger about to rip the head from our shoulders. Surprises were usually bad news. (Think about this the next time you're crouching in the dark in somebody's front hall closet with their raincoats and umbrellas.) — Paul Powers

I had 30-something years' experience in modeling, which is rare. — Lauren Hutton

When a woman is secure with herself, she isn't afraid to define herself and defy public opinion. She has her own look. Her own style. Her own charisma. Her own brand of charm. A man wants something he doesn't see every day. Not in terms of a redhead versus a blonde. He wants the rare woman who can think for herself. — Sherry Argov

To a woman flattery is not flattery.It is a compliment, which unfortunately in these miserable days has become all to rare. A woman is not a piece of steel furniture; she is a flower - she does not ask for reality; she wants the warm, gay sun of flattery.It is better to say something pretty to her every day, than to slave grimly for her all your life. — Erich Maria Remarque

That was an amazing night in the city. But, there's something rare and intimate about being here - just you, me, the ocean, and the moon. — Nicole Gulla

I know some of my self-worth comes from tennis, and it's hard to think of doing something else where you know you'll never be thebest. Tennis players are rare creatures: where else in the world can you know that you're the best? The definitiveness of it is the beauty of it, but it's not all there is to life and I'm ready to explore the alternatives. — Martina Navratilova

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking. — Mortimer J. Adler

Unlike them, however, her path was not through daring deeds or the study of magic or the use of miraculous powers. She had been gifted with something almost as rare: an open and eager mind. She had the gift of watching and listening, the gift of taking all the hurts and happenings of others' lives and understanding their purpose. — William Joyce

You have a rare fire within you. The power to change things. The courage to act in the service of something greater than yourself. — Moira Young

I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig
or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery. — Jostein Gaarder

Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech. — Bill Bryson

Insight, vision, moments of revelation. During those rare moments something overtakes the man and he becomes the tool of a greater Force; the servant of, willing or unwilling depending on his degree of awakeness. The photograph, then, is a message more than a mirror, and the mans a messenger who happens to be a photographer. — Minor White

The world needs them - the ones who absorb the emotions of others, which diminishes their pain and disquietude and the world also uses them as a repository for confessions, secrets, grudges and indignation. They will leave these uncommon and intuitive individuals feeling unburdened themselves while the unusual individual will be weighed down by having taken on those burdens in addition to their own. The world needs them but what they need is something as aberrant as themselves, and that is silence, stillness and rest. — Donna Lynn Hope

The mercy bullet
I envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something in me gets broken, physically or spiritually, I would do well to look for a proficient killer, even if he is one of my enemies. I will pay him a fee and the price of the bullet, kiss his hand and his revolver, and if I am able to write, extol him in a poem of rare beauty, for which he can choose the metre and rhyme. — Mahmoud Darwish

It's rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about. The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves would only view at gunpoint. — Stephen Gaghan

She can remember everyone admiring a rare kind of evening they spoke of as something they ought to save from oblivion to describe to their children later. And that for her part she would have had it hidden, had that late summer evening buried and burned to ashes. — Marguerite Duras

A falling star is actually on fire as it enters the atmosphere, so if I were to try and catch one, I'm pretty sure there would be some pain involved. Though, I would suppose some pain would be worth it to find something so rare. — Sadie Grubor

was something different about his genetic structure. His ex-lover Megan Reed had once told him he was a 'super-compatible', a rare human anomaly who could accept augs without the yoke of the anti-rejection drug to keep him whole. Jensen was still undecided if that was a gift or a curse, and he couldn't stop himself from wondering if this unique quality was some loose thread left behind by other unanswered questions from his past. Questions — James Swallow

I found something for you." He ignored the pangs of hunger and lowered himself to one knee before her. Her eyes widened. He swung his hand around from behind his back and held out a lone orchid the same shade as the moon overhead. And once again, he wished he knew what to say, how to talk to her, how to be more sophisticated. Instead, he thrust it before her. She tentatively took it from him and lifted questioning eyes. "For your collection of specimens," he offered. Her fingers caressed the drooping petals. "I think it's a yellow lady's slipper." He didn't know nor did he care. He only knew that he wanted one of her rare smiles. For a long intense moment, he held his breath. Finally her lips curved into a smile. "Thank you." His pulse jolted forward and he swallowed hard. "You're welcome." What was happening to him? Why did he want to make her happy? When she lifted the flower to her nose and took a deep breath, her smile moved to her eyes . . . And to his heart. — Jody Hedlund

Listen, listen!" I interrupted her. "Forgive me if I tell you something else ... I tell you what, I can't help coming here to-morrow, I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help going over such moments again in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year. I shall certainly come here to-morrow, just here to this place, just at the same hour, and I shall be happy remembering today. This place is dear to me already. I have already two or three such places in Petersburg. I once shed tears over memories ... like you ... Who knows, perhaps you were weeping ten minutes ago over some memory ... But, forgive me, I have forgotten myself again; perhaps you have once been particularly happy here ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When I got into all the grunge stuff, I really liked Hole. I actually saw them in concert when I was a sophomore in high school. It was kind of rare to see a successful female rocker get down and dirty with the guys. And Courtney Love did. It was fun to be a fan of something different. — Carrie Underwood

The only possible explanation for the absence of a proactive word to express nonviolence is that not only the political establishments but the cultural and intellectual establishments of all societies have viewed nonviolence as a marginal point of view, a fanciful rejection of one of society's key components, a repudiation of something important but not a serious force in itself. It is not an authentic concept but simply the abnegation of something else. It has been marginalized because it is one of the rare truly revolutionary ideas, an idea that seeks to completely change the nature of society, a threat to the established order. And it has always been treated as something profoundly dangerous. — Mark Kurlansky

Anytime my magic involved fire and didn't destroy something of cause an explosion, I considered it a victory.
My victories have been rare. — Suzanne Johnson

So he doesn't tick any of my usual boxes, but there's something in the way he looks at me. In his eyes, there's this strange kind of appreciation that is part attraction, part something else that makes me feel rare and precious and . . . seen. — Cora Carmack

It's strange. There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What? — Ayn Rand

Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman. — Alan Alda

Someone asked the other day, "Why do we go to school?" Pat, with vigor
unusual in her, said, "So when we grow up we won't be stupid." These
children equate stupidity with ignorance. Is this what they mean when they
call themselves stupid? Is this one of the reasons why they are so ashamed of
not knowing something? If so, have we, perhaps un-knowingly, taught them
to feel this way? We should clear up this distinction, show them that it is
possible to know very few facts, but make very good use of them.
Conversely, one can know many facts and still act stupidly. The learned fool
is by no means rare in this country. — John Holt

i didn't plan on falling in love with you, and i doubt you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of us could control what was happening to us. we fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created. — Nicholas Sparks

Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm very focused on the logical progression of the story, and every character has a role to play. — R.A. Salvatore

When it is important for you to say something and you find a vehicle to say it, then go for it. It is so rare when that happens so I think every minute spent fighting for it is always worth it. Even if nothing ends up happening, it's still worth the fight. — Salma Hayek

It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. — Steve Jobs

It's rare for someone to say something to you, just a few words, really, and actually make you see yourself from a completely different vantage point. — Jonathan Tropper

If your heart tells you something but your mind tells you something else, which do you believe? Both are just as apt to lie. In fact, they play at deceit all the time. Mostly they balance each other, giving us that crucial reality check. But what happens on the rare occasions when they conspire together? — Neal Shusterman

It's rare for the studios to find a filmmaker who wants to make a family film. To find someone that has an idea, embraces it, has kids and wants to make something exciting - well, they don't see that too often. — Robert Rodriguez

Religion is not the place where the problem of man's egotism is automatically solved. Rather, it is there that the ultimate battle between human pride and God's grace takes place. Human pride may win the battle, and then religion can and does become one more instrument of human sin. But if there the self does meet God and His grace, and so surrenders to something beyond its self-interest, then Christian faith can prove to be the needed and rare release from human self-concern. — Langdon Brown Gilkey

A boy admiring a pretty girl. A rare thing to be certain. But love-true love-is something else. — Alex Flinn

In a world where like everyone's so accessible now, to say something new in an article that you can't find out about a n - - through his Twitter or like Googling him or some s - - is rare. Just like how a good song is rare. — Earl Sweatshirt

Coincidences happen, but I've come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears. — Stephen King

We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has only happened once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory. I'll never forget a single moment of it. — Nicholas Sparks

It's the rare happening when actors get together and you have chemistry, connection, just something that works, that's bigger than what's on the page. — Sandra Bullock

Think about how rare it is that you exist at all. Also think about time this way: If something exists, even for a second, then forever in the future that thing "existed", and forever in the past that thing "was going to exist". So to even be conscious for a millisecond is a kind of immortality, but you have more than a millisecond. You have minutes. Hours. Months. A year? Years! This is a gift. — Alex Hirsch

Part of the kick of making people laugh was doing something different. We were a rare breed - spotting one of us was like pinning a space alien, or abdominal snowman. There were maybe a hundred stand-ups in the whole country when I was doing it. — Lenny Bruce

Raff,' Katsa said, 'your problem is that your heart's not in it. We need to find something to strengthen your defensive resolve. What if you pretended he's trying to smash your favorite medicinal plant?'
'The rare blue safflower,' Bann suggested.
'Yes,' Katsa said gamely, 'pretend he's after your snaffler.'
'Bann would never come after my rare blue safflower,' Raffin said distinctly. 'The very notion is absurd.'
'Pretend he's not Bann. Pretend he's your father. — Kristin Cashore

His writing had become, like a stash of rare and troubling pornography, something that must be kept hidden, an obsession that other people would be mystified to discover. — Kevin Wilson

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person - this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? — Joseph Conrad

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to. — Dave Eggers

Her smile didn't mean her suffering was over, but when it appeared it was something beautiful to see; a rare flower. — Melissa C. Water

There's something really special for a young person to sit in an audience and discover somebody, and it's rare to do because so much of a movie's economics are based on pre-existing actors or actresses. — Craig Brewer

Lying flat on my back, with my toes dipped into the lake, I stared at the stars for a second. I guess I should have pondered their beauty and realized the rarity of a sky unsaturated by city lights, or something. But it occurred to me that you could probably see stars from the vast majority of the earth. It was city lights that were actually rare. — Emily Adrian

When I walk into a room, you're the only person I see. My brain doesn't get a choice anymore, because there's something inside you so rare it radiates out and blocks everyone else. You have the kind of beauty that can't be manufactured - the kind that comes from in here." He tapped a finger against her chest. "I didn't know what real beauty was before I met you, but I get it now. So trust me when I say you're the most breathtaking girl in my world. — Melissa Landers

combining passion and contribution is a luxury: not that it's expensive, but just rare. It's something that many people either can't figure out — Eric Schmidt

I was suffering, seemingly, from some extraordinary fault in my relation to reality, something so uniquely wrong that it compelled me to perceive, at rare intervals, large blocks of otherwise perfectly normal personal experience displaced from their proper positions in Time. — J.W. Dunne

When I say 'rare,' it's my own term. It's like you're doing something with a photo that is dominant that no one has ever seen before. #Rare means that it can only be seen here. It's just a rare moment that I'm sharing with the world. — Theophilus London

Usually it seems like either you sacrifice something and a lot of people will pay attention, or you stay true to yourself and appeal to a smaller group of people, but now we've managed to do what we felt was the right thing to do in our heart and had it reach a wide audience. It feels very rare. — Jack Antonoff

I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut - this indescribably emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do.
Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner. — Hugh Howey

It's rare enough as an older generation player that you're 100% fit - there's always something niggling. — Brian O'Driscoll

Art means something very rare, an extraordinary achievement. — Wayne Thiebaud

Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that, just as the physician speaks of going around with an illness in the body, he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain. — Soren Kierkegaard

Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones. — George Bernard Shaw

But what made him still more fortunate, as he said himself, was having a daughter of such exceeding beauty, rare intelligence, gracefulness, and virtue, that everyone who knew her and beheld her marvelled at the extraordinary gifts with which heaven and nature had endowed her. As a child she was beautiful, she continued to grow in beauty, and at the age of sixteen she was most lovely. The fame of her beauty began to spread abroad through all the villages around - but why do I say the villages around, merely, when it spread to distant cities, and even made its way into the halls of royalty and reached the ears of people of every class, who came from all sides to see her as if to see something rare and curious, or some wonder-working image? — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

I miss our Would You Rather conversations and your hilarious answers. I miss your laugh. I miss the way I feel when I make you laugh. Like I just won something really important. I miss just sitting with you in perfect, silent understanding. I miss the way you never judge anyone. It's such a rare find, Liv. And I miss watching how kind you are with everyone. I miss being able to call you and talk to you about random shit and important shit. I miss my best friend. I miss you. I love you. — Samantha Young

What we need, of course, is a language which will allow us to distinguish the normal or routine fuck from the glorious, the rare, or the lousy one - a fack from a fick, a fick from a fock - but we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses, and our earthy words are all ... well ... 'dirty'. It says something dirty about us, no doubt, because in a society which had a mind for the body and other similarly vital things, there would be a word for coming down, or going up, words for nibbles on the bias, earlobe loving, and every variety of tongue track. After all, how many kinds of birds do we distinguish? We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming. In fact our entire vocabulary for states of consciousness is critically impoverished. — William H Gass

There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tryant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation. — Amos Oz

Some things were certain - they had already happened - but the future could not be divined. Perhaps by Ida Paine. For everyone else, the future was no ally. A person had only his life to barter with. He felt that way. He could lose himself ... or trade what he had for something he cared about. That rare thing. Either way, his life would be spent. — David Wroblewski

This real fucking genius, though I don't really think anybody knew that back then, but there was something in him. Charisma. Gentleness, a kind of acceptance of people for who they are. That's rare, you know? Someone who never, never judges. Most people have a nasty interior monologue going on at all times, not Lotto. He'd rather think kindly of you. Easier that way. — Lauren Groff

Appreciation involves being alert to the positive aspects of the current situation and feeling thankful for what one has and for one's circumstances. This requires not only a positive perspective in the present but also conscious awareness of features in the surround. The latter, in fact, is something that may be surprisingly rare. Especially when we are engaging in routine activities, we often do so mindlessly (Langer, 1997) or as though we were on automatic pilot (Cialdini, 1993). If we learn to bring our attention to the current state, we can choose to focus on positive aspects of the situation and to remind ourselves of the potential sources of good feelings that might otherwise pass unnoticed. — Sandra L. Schneider

And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzling over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own. — Hermann Hesse

A world without God to give people faith that all their suffering is not meaningless is a nightmare. A world without religion means a world without any systematic way of ennobling people. A world without countries is a world without the United States of America, and it is a world governed by the amoral United Nations, where mass murderers sit on "human rights" councils. A world without heaven or hell is a world without any ultimate justice, where torturers and their victims have identical fates. A world without possessions is a world in which some enormous state possesses everything, and the individual is reduced to the status of a well-fed serf. Liberals frequently criticize conservatives for fearing change. What we fear is transforming that which is already good. The moral record of humanity does not fill us with optimism about "fundamentally transforming" something as rare as America. Evil is normal. America is not. — Dennis Prager

In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo — Colson Whitehead

If I could be anything in this world I would be rare. So rare that the people I loved never forgot me or ever found anything to compare me to. I was never a type, but the only type
the person you couldn't throw away because you would never be able to describe the mystery of something that didn't fit this world. — Shannon L. Alder

Love is both hard and soft. It is the most believable truth and fiction. It is something we fight for and fight with. It is the yin and yang. It is the most contradictory of emotions, making you believe in both the extraordinary existence of heaven and scorches of hell. If you allow it, a saturation of complexities can destroy it and leave you desperately choking for the remnants, clawing for a miniscule flake of ash of what you had . True love is a rare miracle held in the highest veneration. Blessed are those who even come close its illumination. Only those who are selflessly brave can become victorious and claim this exceptional phenomenon, if just for a memory in time. — S.V.C. Ricketts

There are 2 kinds of artists, essentially: those who want to make something popular, and those who want to make something dignified. But then there is still that rare hybrid case, and perhaps by that unintentional stroke of genius, in which one's work uncontrollably becomes both popular and dignified yet beyond its time. — Criss Jami

Sheryl Sandberg: "It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It's also a very clear path to happiness."115 She couldn't be more right. You will not be as successful as you could be if you only like what you do and don't love it. Trite, perhaps, but true. Sheryl is also right in saying that combining passion and contribution is a luxury: not that it's expensive, but just rare. It's something that many people either can't figure out (how many people truly know their passion at the outset of their careers?) or can't afford (you may love whittling garden gnomes, but the world loves engineers and your spouse and children love a regular paycheck). — Eric Schmidt

It's rare that you cut out something that is really good. You screen all of it, and when the audience doesn't respond, you cut out whatever is holding the story down. — Keenen Ivory Wayans

Violence is very much with us, and we like to see it. I doubt if you can change that, and I'm not sure you should want to. I have occasionally been very upset by something I was writing, but it's quite rare: I keep my writing very separate from my life. — Ruth Rendell

The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl. But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it. — Sara Gran

It's rare that I've read a script where I'm like, "Oh, my god, it's hilarious!" All you want is a good skeleton and good characters. Then, you can go, "Okay, I can bring a lot to this. I can improvise and I can create something out of this." — Nick Swardson

The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a rare gift. Those who possess it are ..said to have resilience or courage. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling - something — O. Henry

Occasionally if you do something extraordinary, the crew responds with spontaneous applause, but that's very rare. — Claudia Christian

He studied the woman before him, not as lovely as she once was, ordinary in appearance, scarred by living, abandoned by many, breathtakingly to be near and altogether unforgettable. "I have no friends," she spoke forth hauntingly. "I am alone." He couldn't believe it. But then he could for the rare creature near enough to touch was out of their league. She wasn't envied for the shallowness of appearance or the superficiality of status or possessions; she was envied for being uncommon and for possessing indomitable strength, something only a lifetime of suffering could shape. — Donna Lynn Hope