The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Both within the family and without, our sisters hold up our mirrors: our images of who we are and of who we can dare to be.

Elizabeth Fishel

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In most all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separatedness, as is the case with those who are members or a compact tribe, church, party, etcetera, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Pleasure-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives.

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (

I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor England! did I know till then what love I bore to thee.

William Wordsworth

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

C.S. Lewis

God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage

Mark Twain

Ingratitude is monstrous

William Shakespeare

In the military, I learned that 'leadership' means raising your hand and volunteering for the tough, important assignments.

Tulsi Gabbard

Never say oops in the operating room.

Dr. Leo Troy

Think 100 times before you take a decision, But once that decision is taken, stand by it as one man.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

Winston Churchill

We don't pray for the land. We pray for the humans, all humans... starting with the president, Mohammed Morsi, and all officials, and for God to give everyone wisdom and responsibility to manage the affairs of this country and its people in true Egyptian spirit.

Pope Theodoros II

Once you're in a particular country, and you're surrounded by musicians who are so adept at traditional music, you suddenly realize how much there is to explore and digest and learn and experience.

Evelyn Glennie