We can only know one thing about God -- that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.

Richard Selzer

The greatest self is a peaceful smile, that always sees the world smiling back.

Bryant McGill

I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog; they're the best for every day.

George Bernard Shaw

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

William Faulkner

Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression...

Karl Marx

The dice of Zeus always fall luckily.

Sophocles

It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.

Victor Hugo

All the worlds a stage,And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurses arms. Then the whining school-boy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress eyebrow. Then a soldier,Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputationEven in the cannons mouth. And then the justice,In fair round belly with good capon lind,With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,Full of wise saws and modern instances;And so he plays his part. The sixth age shiftsInto the lean and slipperd pantaloon dotard,With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,His youthful hose, well savd, a world too wideFor his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,Turning again toward childish treble, pipesAnd whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion,Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.

William Shakespeare

He scratched his ear, the infallible resource to which embarrassed people have recourse.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

Anatole France

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. King Solomon

Bible

Reverence is the highest quality of man's nature; and that individual, or nation, which has it slightly developed, is so far unfortunate. It is a strong spiritual instinct, and seeks to form channels for itself where none exists; thus Americans, in the dearth of other objects to worship, fall to worshiping themselves.

Lydia Maria Child