Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw The blind to hide the garden, where the moonEnjoys the open blossoms as they strawTheir beauty for his taking, boon for boon.And I do lift my aching arms to you,And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,And I do weep for very pain of you,And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.

Albert Einstein

The foreign accent was a promise, and indeed, all over the country, European imports added spice to the sciences, the arts, and other areas. What one had to give was not considered inferior to what one received.

Rudolf Arnheim

They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.

Leo Tolstoy

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.

Aristotle

I don't wait for the calendar to figure out when I should live life.

Gene Simmons

I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.

John Shelton Reed

It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

George Eliot

There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.

Mother Theresa

To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

John Green

The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.

Tom Morello

If you hug to yourself any resentment against anybody else, you destroy the bridge by which God would come to you.

Peter Marshall

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Bertrand Russell