We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.

George Orwell

All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty; for beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.

Evelyn Underhill

What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life and reading.

Harry Mathews

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

Khalil Gibran

To will is to put your emotion into your desire. Simply wanting is not desire, it is merely an undirected thought with no purpose but to pass the time.

Stephen Richards

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

Oscar Wilde

I don't know any other way to lead but by example.

Don Shula

There is nothing that moves a loving father's soul quite like his child's cry.

Joni Eareckson Tada

Age becomes reality when you hear someone refer to that attractive young woman standing next to the woman in the green dress, and you find that you're the one in the green dress.

Lois Wyse

World is suddener than we fancy it.

Emma Donoghue

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.

Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov)