Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his day

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.

Charles Dickens

A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say .Come, be my wife! With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. Marriage for love is the most beautiful external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the least clean traffic that defiles the world.

Olive Schreiner

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Margaret Mead

The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art.

Thomas Aquinas

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

Maurice Sendak

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

Thomas Carlyle

Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

Viktor E. Frankl

I've never been more famous than I was, suddenly, in 1986.

Wendy Cope

I blow up fireworks all the time, and I love making milkshakes and banana splits.

Chris Isaak

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Tennessee Williams

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.

Anthony Burgess

A hair divides what is false and true.

Omar Khayyam