Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

Kurt Vonnegut

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Gustave Flaubert

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

George Santayana

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Honore de Balzac

My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them

Abraham Lincoln

Aye, aye, that's the way wi' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's

George Eliot

It is an enduring truth, which can never be altered, that every infraction of the Law of nature must carry its punitive consequences with it. We can never get beyond that range of cause and effect.

Thomas Troward

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

E. M. Forster

You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Eldridge Cleaver

Bush is morally a universalist. For instance, he says the freedom is good, the same thing is good, all over the world. So in that sense he's a universalist.

Peter Singer

Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.

Mattie Stepanek

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war.

Charles de Gaulle