It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean even if it did build muscle whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.

Christopher Hitchens

You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better than you think you can.

Jimmy Carter

Twenty-four-hour room service generally refers to the length of time that it takes for the club sandwich to arrive. This is indeed disheartening, particularly when you

Fran Lebowitz

Marriage is sacred and protected and has nothing to do with violating our civil rights.

Jack Kingston

So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.

Thomas Dolby

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

Pat Conroy

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

Mark Twain

There are divers men who make a great show of loyalty, and pretend to such discretion in the hidden things they hear, that at the end folk come to put faith in them.

Marie de France

The ear that heareth the reproof of life abideth among the wise. Proverbs 15: 31

Bible

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Aristotle

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

Thomas Wolfe

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley