When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you will become a general. If you become a monk, then you will end up as Pope.' Instead, I became a painter, and wound up as Picasso.

The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.

C.S. Lewis

Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.

Truman Capote

Some people's developmental path has not equipped them to stand up and let go of something.

Henry Cloud

Sin is geographical.

Bertrand Russell

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

Rene Descartes

She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?' 'I'm sorry,' she replied quietly. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away the grief; that is what they are for'

Terry Pratchett

We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility.

Kwame Nkrumah

I love film. After a yummy meal for the whole family and some truly great friends, we often go out to see something beautiful and unique.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own.

George Eliot

We all have times when we go home at night and pull out our hair and feel misunderstood and lonely and like we're falling. I think the brain is such that there is always going to be something missing.

Jude Law

Excellent firms don't believe in excellence - only in constant improvement and constant change.

Tom Peters

Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley