I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this.

And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men.

Alfred Tennyson

Science grows like a weed every year.

Kary Mullis

The care of human life and happiness, and their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of a good government.

Thomas Jefferson

By day the appalling loose beauty of prowling floes: lions' heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks, and a thing like a blown rose.

Andrew Motion

The more I saw of foreign countries the more I loved my own.

De Delloy

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Oscar Wilde

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

Erich Fromm

If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to co-operate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one's happiness would be increased

Bertrand Russell

My fear... is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

Franz Kafka

Fate does not invite ugly boring people to save the world; and if you try to save the world (without being beautiful, strong, clever, or wise), you will soon die pointlessly and how much adventure is there in that?

James Alan Gardner

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

Henry David Thoreau