To an adolescent, there is nothing in the world more embarrassing than a parent.

Is this some manly bonding thing I can't be a part of? Are you getting matching haircuts?

Cassandra Clare

To give money to a woman - and here I must speak as a man - is to deny her special quality, her irreplaceability, and reduce her unique amiability to a commodity. Money takes away her name, while transforming her lover into a nameless customer of a market of appetites.

James Buchan

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

Oscar Wilde

A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.

William Hazlitt

... life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole...

Jane Addams

Her eyes are homes of silent prayers.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward.

Soren Kierkegaard, Journals and

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

John Green

Other nations have tried to check... the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

John Louis O'Sullivan

Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.

Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes

Crowds are the most difficult thing for me these days because I have to walk with my head down and my eyes averted. There's still that part of me that wants to hold my head up, make eye contact and smile.

Cameron Diaz