Prophecy today is hardly the romantic business that it used to be. The old tools of the trade, like the sword, the hair shirt, and the long fast in the wilderness, have given way to more contemporary, mundane instruments of doom --the book, the picket and the petition, the sit-in at City Hall.

It is strange that modesty is the rule for women when what they most value in men is boldness.

Ninon De L'Enclos

Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.

Terry Pratchett

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

C.S. Lewis

The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Barbara Kingsolver

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

Erma Bombeck

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

Edward Gibbon

You have been blessed with immeasurable power to make positive changes in your life.

Steve Maraboli

Self-love, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.

William Shakespeare

Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing. You don't win once in a while; you don't do things right once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game, and that's first place

Vince Lombardi

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

W. H. Auden

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.

Aesop