115 Rare Quotes That Say What Most People Never Put Into Words
Some quotes stand out because they tell the truth in a way you’ve never heard before.
They make you stop.
They make you think.
Not only that, but they feel uncommon in a world full of repeated lines.
These rare quotes do exactly that. They offer insight that feels fresh and unforgettable.
Deep Rare Quotes
“Live your questions now and live into your answers.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
“Time is the substance I am made of.” — Jorge Luis Borges
“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure is to dream more.” — Marcel Proust
“There is no doubt that the highest art is the art of living.” — Virginia Woolf
“I treat words as if they were things.” — Anaïs Nin
“Art is a revolt against fate.” — André Malraux
“I close my eyes in order to see.” — Paul Gauguin
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann
“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” — Anton Chekhov
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” — Gore Vidal
“Talent is hit or miss. It is the truth in a voice that holds us.” — Grace Paley
“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.” — Paul Cézanne
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou
“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” — Twyla Tharp
“The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire.” — Auguste Rodin
“Between my birth and my death every day is mine.” — Fernando Pessoa
“I can never read all the books I want. I can never be all the people I want.” — Sylvia Plath
“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.” — T. S. Eliot
“It is a terribly hard thing to be a good person.” — Clarice Lispector
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you.” — Arundhati Roy
“The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” — Virginia Woolf
“We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are that is the fact.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung
“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness nothing more.” — J. K. Rowling
“Pain is a more individual thing than happiness.” — C. S. Lewis
“The heart is a lonely hunter.” — Carson McCullers
“Perhaps it is impossible to understand one without the other.” — Flannery O’Connor
“Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” — Iris Murdoch
“It is the longing for impossible things that stings most.” — Fernando Pessoa
“The only journey is the one within.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
“What you seek is seeking you.” — Rumi
“You are your best thing.” — Toni Morrison
“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.” — Marcel Proust
“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” — William James
“Courage is grace under pressure.” — Ernest Hemingway
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” — Socrates
“Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.” — Søren Kierkegaard
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.” — Epicurus
“To define is to limit.” — Oscar Wilde
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana
“Liberty when it begins to take root is a plant of rapid growth.” — George Washington
“Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens.” — Jimi Hendrix
“Beware of the barrenness of a busy life.” — Socrates
“To understand everything is to forgive everything.” — Leo Tolstoy
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” — Greek Proverb
“If after I die they want my biography they only need two dates and the work I did between them.” — Fernando Pessoa
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” — Rumi
“The art of losing is not hard to master.” — Elizabeth Bishop
“What you think you become.” — Buddha
“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.” — William James
“The mind is everything. What you imagine you create.” — Buddha
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.” — Carl Jung
“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” — William James
“The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery but a process of creation.” — Neale Donald Walsch
Rare Quotes on Love
“Perhaps everything that frightens us is something helpless that wants our love.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart.” — Jorge Luis Borges
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand it was a gift.” — Mary Oliver
“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” — Pablo Neruda
“The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles.” — Virginia Woolf
“To love without knowing how or when or from where.” — Pablo Neruda
“The sound of water is worth more than all the poets’ words.” — Octavio Paz
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer.” — Anaïs Nin
“The constant happiness is curiosity.” — Alice Munro
“People who treat others as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they cast returns to them.” — James Baldwin
“To feel the love of people you love is a fire that feeds life.” — Pablo Neruda
“Grief changes shape but it never ends.” — Keanu Reeves
“Where there is love, there is no darkness.” — Burundian Proverb
“We are more alike than unalike.” — Maya Angelou
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” — Simone Weil
“The heart has no wrinkles.” — Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
“Where there is great love there are always miracles.” — Willa Cather
“Nobody has ever measured how much a heart can hold.” — Zelda Fitzgerald
“To feel deeply is to be human.” — Viktor Frankl
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“The heart is the only broken instrument that works.” — T. E. Kalem
“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.” — Audrey Hepburn
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.” — Thomas Merton
“Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.” — George Eliot
“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance.” — Henry David Thoreau
“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” — Marcel Proust
Rare Quotes on Creativity
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” — Italo Calvino
“The feelings that hurt most are those that are absurd. Nostalgia for what never was.” — Fernando Pessoa
“Only those who risk going too far can find out how far one can go.” — T. S. Eliot
“The ear craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected.” — W. H. Auden
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses waiting to see us act with courage.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing. That is enough.” — T. S. Eliot
“We write to taste life twice.” — Anaïs Nin
“The Man-Moth pays his rare visits to the surface.” — Elizabeth Bishop
“The machine stops yet people continue as if everything were normal.” — E. M. Forster
“A living language is not fixed.” — Fernando Pessoa
“The world breaks everything and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway
“You must change your life.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
“The universe is not made of atoms. It is made of stories.” — Muriel Rukeyser
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.” — Robert Frost
“The goal is not to live forever but to create something that will.” — Chuck Palahniuk
“What is now proved was once only imagined.” — William Blake
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist.” — Oscar Wilde
“Imagination is the eye of the soul.” — Joseph Joubert
“Creativity takes courage.” — Henri Matisse
“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” — Nicolas Chamfort
“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” — W. B. Yeats
“To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.” — William Blake
“The universe is full of stories that live in the dust of everyday life.” — Nadine Gordimer
“To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong.” — Joseph Chilton Pearce
“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
“The moment one gives close attention to anything even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious world in itself.” — Henry Miller
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” — Pablo Picasso
