As Midterms, internship applications, and school drama starts to pile into your busy schedules, you may feel like you need to refocus. Grab some hot tea (because everyone's starting to get sick around campus) and curl up with your favorite book and these quotes to help you destress this week. These are quotes I've written down from my favorite books and from hours of binge watching Netflix that have cheered me up in the midst of the craziness happening at college.
1. “If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself.” - Stephen Colbert, 2011 Commencement Address at Northwestern University
2. “Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.” – Mandy Hale
3. “To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it’s over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that’s rare…That’s rare and valuable” – Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories
4. “Being happy is a very personal thing- and it really has nothing to do with anyone else.” –Abraham-Hicks, Getting into the Vortex
5. “You can obsess and obsess over how things ended–what you did wrong or could have done differently– but there’s not much of a point. It’s not like it’ll change anything. So really, why worry? –Jess Rothenberg, The Catastrophic History of You and Me
6. “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” –Eleanor Roosevelt
7. “People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you’re succeeding. People do not get scared when you’re failing. It calms them. But when you’re winning, it makes them feel like they’re losing or, worse yet, that maybe they should’ve tried to do something too, but now it’s too late. And since they didn’t, they want to stop you. You can’t let them.” – Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?
8. "But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from we can still choose where we go from there." - Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
9. "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own and you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go" - Dr. Seuss, Oh The Places You'll Go
10. “Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.” –Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
11. “Do yourself and everyone else a favor and make your impact a positive one. Please do not be remembered for being dismissive, rude, or unkind. Please do be remembered for being polite, interesting, thoughtful, for listening, sharing a story, doing your dishes, cooking a meal, buying a drink.” – PJ Bond, The Road Most Traveled
12. "It's a funny thing about coming home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You'll realize what's changed is you." – F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
13. "We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all." –The Breakfast Club
14. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” –Steve Jobs, 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford University
15. “In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.” –CoCo Chanel Her Life, Her Secrets (1971)
16. "Enjoy going through life as yourself." -Lena Dunham, Not that Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
17. "Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are." –John Wooden
18. “Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives: to experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.” – Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes
19. “What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.” –Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t take Nothing for My Journey Now
20. "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." –Thomas Jefferson
