The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.

From Les Miserables:All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night; women's voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure accents of virgins and the innocent accent of children, -- voices which are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of angels was approaching through the gloom.Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees.They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that they must kneel.These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in an uninhabited house. While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.

Victor Hugo

Life is sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

Ogden Nash

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

Proverb

Intelligence has no attachment to the opinion it has formed, but only to the truth it may contain; and, knowing that error insinuates itself under the guise of truth, through the same inlets by which truth is admitted, it is ever diffident of its att

Mary Worley Montagu

For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

Sir Walter Raleigh

There's no way in the world that just because women turn the number 40, they're anything less than amazing. That's crazy. If anything, you're even more amazing!

Jennifer Lopez

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

Robert Wilson

The distinguishing part of our Constitution is its liberty. To preserve that liberty inviolate seems the particular duty and proper trust of a member of the House of Commons. But the liberty, the only liberty, I mean is a liberty connected with order: that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.

Edmund Burke

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Maurice Blanchot

There are lots of different ways for women to be a mom in this culture.

Kate Walsh

I think the success of a talk show depends on how true it is to the personality of the person hosting it. The shows I really admire, like 'Oprah' and 'Ellen,' are distinctively like their hosts, so I think my show will be successful only if we try to stay consistent to my own sense of myself.

Jane Pauley

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

William James