Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Even with my divorce and with everything, I don't need money.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

Annie Dillard

I'm a believer in belief. Faith is something that works - it causes people to do things, it has results. It's an intangible, indefinable, very real thing. And it moves people, sometimes to atrocity. And sometimes to survival.

Tommy Lee Jones

Imagine that the keeper of a huge, strong beast notices what makes it angry, what it desires, how it has to be approached and handled, the circumstances and the conditions under which it becomes particularly fierce or calm, what provokes its typical cries, and what tones of voice make it gentle or wild. Once he's spent enough time in the creature's company to acquire all this information, he calls it knowledge, forms it into a systematic branch of expertise, and starts to teach it, despite total ignorance, in fact, about which of the creature's attitudes and desires is commendable or deplorable, good or bad, moral or immoral. His usage of all these terms simply conforms to the great beast's attitudes, and he describes things as good or bad according to its likes and dislikes, and can't justify his usage of the terms any further, but describes as right and good the things which are merely indispensable, since he hasn't realised and can't explain to anyone else how vast a gulf there is between necessity and goodness.

Plato

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.

Henri Frederic Amiel

A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.

Harold MacMillan

Patience means restraining one's inclinations.

Tokugawa Ieyasu

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Johann von Goethe

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Leo Tolstoy

Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason