Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

• Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author and poet

If you have a friend you trust, visit him often, because shrubs and tall grass grow on the road unwalked.

• Attributed to the Norse god Odin in his proverbs and councils in Håvamål

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke, politician

Out of all the unimportant things, football is the most important

• Pope John Paul II

If you take an average person's grand illusion [underpinning their life] away, you also take their happiness

• Henrik Ibsen, playwright

The more I practice, the luckier I get.

• Arnold Palmer, golfer

It is not true that the world is too tired and exhausted to produce anything worth praising.

• Pliny the Younger

Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death! Live!

Jerome Lawrence & Robert E Lee ('Auntie Mame', the stageplay)

The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Isaac Asimov ('Foundation')

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

US President General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953.

Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

Albert Einstein

I'll throw in

Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.

• Dalinar Kholin (or Brandon Sanderson), Oathbringer

Had a roommate for a while in my 20s and we kept a large piece of paper taped to a door and would write funny/profound things we heard or said on it. I've forgotten most of it (and a lot of it is probably inane in retrospect), but one has always stuck with me as life has changed and kept moving:

Home is the place you wish you where when you are everywhere else.

I keep notes on my phone of good quotes, and while most of what I have saved is on the longer side, here are some shorter ones, not necessarily all 1 sentence though:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it

• Aristotle

No matter how strong you are, allies make you stronger

• Commander Shepard (Mass Effect)

If you don't share what you have, you will live a very lonely life

• I don't have an attribution, possibly a reddit or Tildes comment

Start small, and when it gets difficult, make it smaller until you can start

• 99% sure this is from a reddit comment

The truth about a city's aspirations isn't found in its vision. It's found in its budget.

• Brent Toderian

It was the day I understood: War is atrocity committed in the name of survival. It is a lesson I wish I had never learned.

• Javik (Mass Effect 3)

The world should have protected you, and instead you have been asked to protect it. What an honor. What an injustice.

• Melora (Not Another D&D Podcast)

Those with the power to save a life have a duty to try

• The Lovely Ladybug (The Lovely Ladybug comic)

But I realize that peace and harmony won't happen overnight... It will take all of us supporting one another to fight the forces of hate that seek to throw our lives into chaos.

• Zhu Li Moon (Avatar: Legend of Korra comics)

Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war

• MLK

It's just a bad day, not a bad life

• "When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies" by Gunship (song)

We are all time travelers, journeying together into the future. Let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit.

• Stephen Hawking

You can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.

• another reddit comment I think

You can measure the size of a person by the size of the things that bother them.

Money is to life like gas is to a cat; you need it to get around but a good road trip is not made by visiting gas stations.

I think the Uncharted Series digs up some pretty great ones.

The dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible

• T.E. Lawrence

There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory

• Francis Drake

I woke up with that feeling you get sometimes that you're going to die in about five minutes.

• PG Wodehouse

I’ve never been able to find the OP but for a long time I had this quote on my mirror and it was almost my first tattoo:

I have fallen apart many times, but what does that say about me besides I live through war.

Edit: decided to add

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing’

• Mark Z Danielewski

It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it’s mine.

• Mark Z Danielewski

Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind.

• Mark Z Danielewski

Scars are the paler pain of survival received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

• Mark Z Danielewski

Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.

• Mark Z Danielewski

I’ll give you three guesses as to who my favorite author is. These are all from one book of his, House of Leaves, which is my favorite book of all time and I would have a hard time thinking of books I would put in the same tier (if I'm doing a personal review, I'm sure others would disagree)

I never fall in love. It's the women who benefit from the love I always have...

• By a writer and good friend of mine. It's better in the original...

"In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on"

-- Robert Frost

Well, it's technically two sentences but yeah :)

'The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.'

"My actions are my only true belongings."

— Thich Nhat Hanh

If people weren’t so often wrong, we wouldn’t be so rich.

• Charlie Munger.

I just read Musicophilia and I'm in love with the language of Oliver Sacks:

There is nothing alive which is not individual.

Posture we may say is a reflection of gravity.

One may have intended the replicability and uniformities of science but one encounter the vicissitudes of history or romance.

He thought deeply on the nature of mercy wondering wether it could trancend without transgressing the fixed laws of fate.

Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men; For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.

Bertolt Brecht
Referring to Arturo Ui (representing Adolf Hitler), in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)

A quote I've seen recently:

Forest precede civilization; deserts follow.

This is frequently attributed to Chateaubriand but that's probably incorrect. They searched with Google ngrams and apparently the first occurrence they found was in 1839, but the first time it was attributed to Chateaubriand was in 1896.

When you put someone on a pedestal, you force them to look down on you.

- Someone on r/askmen talking about things to avoid in relationships. I will definitely actually follow this advice instead of saving it once and acting as if I never heard it.

Good satire raises questions about reality.

(IDK the source, but I first heard it here)

Luck favors the prepared.

- Edna Mode (actually, Louis Pasteur)

The brain is the only part of the body that named itself.

- (Idk)

"[Even] Bigotry is intersectional."

- Ian Danskin, AKA Innuendo Studios

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

-Ian Stewart

(This quote is about the human brain, but I wonder if this also applies to other human stuff like relationships, honestly.)