50 Quotes That Every INFP Will Instantly Relate To
“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” --G.K. Chesterton
By 
Heidi Priebe
1. “I think too much. I think ahead. I think behind. I think sideways. I think it all. If it exists, I’ve fucking thought of it.”
–Winona Ryder
2. “Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
–Erica Jong
3. “Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”
–Erica Jong
4. “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
–Anais Nin
5. “I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
–G.K. Chesterton
6. “There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”
–Anais Nin
7. You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
–Angela Davis
8. “Under the obsessive thoughts and plans, under the emotions, positive and negative, there is an ocean of peace.”
–Gangaji
9. “People will kill you over time and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like “be realistic.”
–Dylan Moran
10. “People aren’t always what you want them to be. Sometimes they disappoint you or let you down, but you have to give them a chance first. You can’t just meet someone and expect them to be everything you’re looking for and then be angry when they’re not every hope and aspiration you projected onto them. It’s foolish to believe that someone will be what you imagine them to be. And sometimes, when you give them a chance, they turn out to be better than you imagined. Different, but better.”
–Chloe Rattray
11. Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.
–Fran Lebowitz
12. “The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”
–Thomas Merton
13. “You must be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent.”
–Paulo Coelho
14. “Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship you have.”
–Robert Holden
15. “Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs. I know it’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do—have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.”
–Cheryl Strayed
16. “You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”
–Pearl Buck
17. “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
–Carl Jung
18. “I think a lot of art is trying to make someone love you.”
–Keaton Henson
19. “Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”
–Cheryl Strayed
20. “In general, people are not drawn to perfection in others. People are drawn to shared interests, shared problems, and an individual’s life energy. Humans connect with humans. Hiding one’s humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting.”
–Robert Glover
21. “If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”
–Elif Safek
22. “I advise you to stop sharing your dreams with people who try to hold you back, even if they’re your parents. Because, if you’re the kind of person who senses there’s something out there for you beyond whatever it is you’re expected to do – if you want to be EXTRA-ordinary – you will not get there by hanging around a bunch of people who tell you you’re not extraordinary. Instead, you will probably become as ordinary as they expect you to be.”
–Kelly Cutrone
23. “Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”
–Naguib Mahfouz
24. “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
–M. Scott Peck
25. “I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not.”
–Kurt Cobain
26. “Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
–Marilyn Monroe
27. “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
–Chris McCandless
28. “Never sacrifice who you could be in the future for who you think you are right now. Identity isn’t found. It’s made.”
–Jan Angelique Maravilla
29. “I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.”
–Joshua Graham
30. “If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred. If you want to see the brave, look for those who can forgive.”
–Bhagavad Gita
31. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
–Martin Luther King Jr
32. “Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
–Cheryl Strayed
33. “I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.”
–Audrey Hepburn
34. “It’s funny how artistic we become when our hearts are broken.”
–Hotel Books
35. “There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald
36. “You have to accept that some people are not made for deep conversations, or for holding you together when you’re about to fall apart, or for keeping you from unzipping your skin, or for talking you out of suicide, or to love you through the worst moments of your life. Some people are made for shallow exchanges, and ridiculous banter, and nothing more. And that’s okay. That doesn’t make them horrible people because they simply aren’t able to handle a storm like you. It doesn’t make you a bad person because you won’t divulge all the gritty details of your horror show. It makes you smart. You have to accept that there will be people that cannot give you what you need. It doesn’t mean they are not worth keeping in your life. You just have to figure out who these ones are before you’re disappointed. And you have to keep them at arm’s length. You cannot expect everyone in your life to understand, to be nonjudgmental, to get it. But that’s okay, because not everyone was made to impart wisdom, or wax-poetic, or speak on politics and the depravity of society, or discuss how crucial it is that the stigma of mental illness be abolished. There are times when you have to get away from all that heaviness. You have to. And you will need superficial conversation about Kim Kardashian’s arse, or a debate on the colour of The Dress. You will need those ones. So don’t go round cutting people off and dropping your friends. You need people for all your seasons. You need people or you won’t survive this.”
37. “I’ve never been very good at leaving things behind. I tried, but I have always left fragments of myself there too, like seeds awaiting their chance to grow.”
–Joanne Harris
38. “There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.”
–Michel de Montaigne
39. “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
–Ernest Hemingway
40. “You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed.”
–Iyanla Vanzant
41. “The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
–Cheryl Strayed
42. “Life is about change. Sometimes it’s painful; sometimes it’s beautiful. But most of the time it is both.”
–Lana Lang
43. “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.”
–Buddhist Teaching
44. “I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them.”
–Uma Thurman
45. “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
–Pablo Neruda
46. “Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and the thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see the greatness within you, even when you don’t see it yourself.”
–Edmund Lee
47. “Music, perfected, has no melody.
Love, perfected, has no climax.
Art, perfected, has no meaning.”
–Tao Te Ching
48. “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
–The Velveteen Rabbit
49. “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
–Eleanor Roosevelt
50. “In the end, I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.”
–Andrea Gibson