These are in no particular order.

Do you want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it.
--Robert Pirsig

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.
--Aristotle

One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems--wars, religions, nations, destructions--to refuse to be a part of them, and express instead the highest selves we know how to be.
--Richard Bach

We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we have still to make a study of 'and.'
--A.S. Eddington

Desire's most seductive promise is not pleasure but change, not that you might possess your object but that you might become the one who belongs with it.
--James Richardson

How we choose what we do, and how we approach it...will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.
--Mihalyi Csikzsentmihalyi

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to.
--Oscar Wilde

Words. She knows so many. She knows seven languages, and all of them different, and in all of them she is hungry.
--Candas Jane Dorsey, _Black Wine_

What is history but a fable agreed upon?
--Napoleon Bonaparte

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
--Wallace Stevens

Machine and garden are not absolutely opposed to each other. Machinery can exist in the garden... The question is not one of restricting machines from the garden but asking whether a machine serves the interest of the garden, or the garden the interest of the machine.
--James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

...Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress but the memory of the smell of smoke and the presumption that once our eyes watered.
--Tom Stoppard

Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.
Marcus Aurelius

'What is a human being, then?'
'A seed.'
'A... seed?'
'An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree.'
--David Zindell, The Broken God

If a "religion" is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.
--John Barrow

Poetry is the art of not succeeding;
the art of making a little ritual
out of your own bad luck, lighting a little fire
made of leaves, reciting a prayer
in the ordinary dark.
-- Joe Salerno

Don't be dismayed at goodbyes.
A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes,
is certain for those who are friends.
--Richard Bach

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
--Albert Einstein

The possibility of stepping into a higher plane is quite real for everyone. It requires no force or effort or sacrifice. It involves little more than changing our ideas about what is normal.
--Deepak Chopra

We must lighten ourselves to survive. We must not cling. Safety lies in lessening, in becoming random and thin enough for the new to enter. Only folly dares those leaps that give life.
--John Updike

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
--Jorge Luis Borges

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Exit, pursued by a bear.
--William Shakespeare