Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.

John Ruskin

A broken friendship that is mended through forgiveness can be even stronger than it once was.

Stephen Richards

We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.

Joseph Joubert

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

Bertrand Russell

Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.

George Gurdjieff

But you still need the two: the dark and the light. You can't see one without the other.

Julia Green

You'll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I'll make life. You can't break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can't make me.

Orson Scott Card

The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.

Milton Glaser

We have tried to make it clear that the United States is not just an old cow that gives more milk the more it is kicked in the flanks.

Dean Rusk

The City's reluctance to take a stand on an issue like the British Gas pay row makes a mockery of corporate governance and shareholders' ability to influence annual general meetings. Institutions should be obliged to make public how they vote at such events. They should be obliged to provide customers with a record of how they vote on every kind of issue.

Patrick Donovan

My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.

Jaron Lanier

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes