The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature, necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Blaise Pascal

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

Amy Tan

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

If India is not secular, then India is not India at all.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Edmund Burke

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

W. H. Auden

One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

One day I promised God that if he would give me my voice back I would never smoke again. I got three octaves back after quitting.

Mariah Carey

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

Ernest Hemingway

Perhaps nobody ever accomplishes all that he feels lies in him to do; but nearly every one who tries his power touches the walls of his being.

Charles Dudley Warner

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

Henry David Thoreau

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Anna Quindlen