Inspirational Quotes 33

Looks don’t matter. Personality is more important. It’s what’s on the inside that counts. And you'll find someone when you're not looking. We all know that.

A couple of doors away was the Northgate Café, with the pretty waitresses who were going to marry undergraduates by hook or if necessary by crook… Husband-hunting among undergraduates had always been an arduous sport. (Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Magic of My Youth, writing about the 1900s)

These days, single, urban, educated women in China are called "sheng nu" or "leftover women". BBC Feb 2013 (The one-child policy creates a surplus of men, but Chinese men “marry down”, so those left over are A quality women and D quality men. Thank goodness we live in the West – where exactly the same thing happens.)

We become to an extent what we appear to be. (Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Magic of My Youth)

I’d let [my hair] go grey, but in my business that’s like signing your own death warrant. (Joanna Lumley, Guardian 2013-02-23)

Kids, when given the opportunity, will always "hang out with kids who are similar" to them. (Jezebel.com) (Be a unique snowflake.)

[He] defines emotional labour as "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display." (Jezebel.com)

Many people find their career options are limited because they are shy. (huffpost.com)

The crowning ambition in my life is to be able to be with another person. That’s what we all want. We say we want world peace… (Sue Perkins, Times Feb 2013)

Their children, wives, bosses, families are frightened of them, and they scare everyone away… They have no friends. Their family has left. All they do is work or act out with a whole variety of addictions. (Mark Fisher, anger management expert, NS Feb 2013, on people who experience constant angry outbursts)

Is she walking fast? Is she not making eye contact with anyone? Is she focused on the sidewalk or her phone? (Jezebel.com tells you how not to look approachable)

Opening the 1966 debate on legalizing homosexuality the late Leo Abse said: “It would be as well, perhaps, to remind the House of other occasions on which legislation which impinges upon human relationships has come before the House. There was ... the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, which finally became law in 1907, which ... ended the prohibition on a man marrying the sister of his dead wife . . . “No one reading the debates ... can but wonder [at reaction in] those days of yesteryear ... the passions that were aroused seem almost droll, and the threats to family stability and the institution of marriage... now seem historical curiosities.” (Quoted by Matthew Parris, Times, Feb 2 2013 re equal marriage)

Like everyone else, you’ll have expected and will have been expected to be straight, to marry, to have kids and do everything mainstream life entails. (Matthew Todd in the Guardian, 2013-02-02)

We value long-term relationships highly, but how often do we do this out of status anxiety rather than a desire for happiness? (@bipolarbear)

Inspirational Quotes 32, and links to the rest