Pearl Annie

"By 'happiness' I do not mean worldly success or outside approval. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature." Edith Wharton 📸Lemonade seller in Naples, Italy, 1949 by Herbert List

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." George Bernard Shaw Illustration by Leanne Hatch

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves." T.S. Eliot Photo by Keystone-france

"There will always be a person who looks like a poem earth wrote to keep you alive." Juansen Dizon Friends, New York City, 1947 Photograph by Ruth Orkin

Whenever I feel helpless in this overwhelming world I become a helper oh, oh, my love on the days when it feels like I have no power I serve others you see, whenever I wash the world's feet my hands immediately stop shaking. john roedel

Each time you look up in the sky Or hear a bluebird brightly sing Or see the winter turn to spring Or stop to pick a daffodil Or gather violets on some hill Or touch a leaf or see a tree It's all God whispering "This is Me". Helen Steiner Rice Image Credit: BinaS_Art

"It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for." Virginia Woolf

"Not the day only, but all things have their morning." Nina Leen Illustrator: Ewa Poklewska-Koziełło

"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." Henry David Thoreau b. 12 July 1817 📸Man reading a book with sika deers at Nara Park by Hans Silvester

"But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me." Pablo Neruda b. 12 July 1904 Photograph by Nina Leen

“The birds fly quietly through us. Oh, I who wish to grow, I look out, and inside me the tree grows. I take refuge, and refuge is inside me.” Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Steven Cassedy Illustration by Maggie Chiang

“They say nobody is coming to save you but many people have saved me even if they didn’t intend to. It can be a smile from a stranger nudge from an animal words from a writer lyrics to a song. We are all saving each other in tiny insignificant ways.” Iris Rose 📸Castello-Lopes

"If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us." Franz Kafka b. 3 July 1883 Franz Kafka in a cafe in Prague in 1910s

"I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity." Anaïs Nin

'Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather. In this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will turn into the best friend we have in the world.' Virginia Woolf 📸Anon

"People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, 'Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner'. I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds." Carl R Rogers Image Credit: CeacoFoil

"Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet." Alain de Botton Children playing in Montmartre, 1969, by Horace Sutton

"To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life." Viggo Mortensen Photo by Edouard Boubat