Books are the liberated spirits of men.

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

Kim Stanley Robinson

A hot bath! I cry, as I sit down in it! Again as I lie flat, a hot bath! How exquisite a pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigors, the austerities, the renunciation of the day.

Rose Macaulay

Not to alter one's faults is to be faulty indeed.

Confucius

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own case and deciding in its own favour would be rather simple minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged: or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

C.S. Lewis

O' What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

William Shakespeare

Never despair, keep pushing on!

Sir Thomas Lipton

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

George Bernard Shaw

I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.

Oscar Wilde

To get nostalgic about other people's music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future.

Neil Peart

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Frank Zappa

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

Angela Carter

Ever since Comte first set the agenda of social science, his megalomania lingers on in sociology, political science, and other disciplines.

Thomas Flanagan