Beauty appears when something is completely and absolutely and openly itself.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Oscar Wilde

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.

Chris Cleave

Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.

Susan Orlean

So someday in the near future hopefully rather than having a foot or a leg amputated we'll just give you an injection of the cells and restore the blood flow. We've also created entire tubes of red blood cells from scratch in the laboratory. So there are a lot of exciting things in the pipeline.

Robert Lanza

Intelligent design itself does not have any content.

George Gilder

My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself.

Antonio Tabucchi

Each small act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of the good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it is passed, until simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away.

Dean Koontz, the character of H.

Naturalness is the easiest thing in the world to acquire, if you will forget yourself-forget about the impression you are trying to make.

Dale Carnegie

Every orientation presupposes a disorientation.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Each sudden gust of light explains itself as flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear.

Andrew Motion

The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.

Thomas Jefferson