All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.

I don't know Who -- or what -- put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone --or Something --and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

Dag Hammarskjold

They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.

William Hazlitt

have you taken leave of your senses

Charles Dickens

Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.

Osho

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

Henri Frederic Amiel

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Albert Einstein

There are some cities that I did take time out to study, 'cause I love history and one of them was Boston, and of course Rome and all of those places like that. But, in Syracuse or Rochester, or any of those places, no.

Connie Francis

We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.

Shauna Niequist

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

Adrienne Rich

I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it's going to work or whether I'm going to fall flat on my face.

Johnny Depp

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

Oh, the ignorance of us upon whom Providence did not sufficiently smile to permit us to be born in New England.

Horace Porter