Being competent means the ability to control and operate the things in the environment and the environment itself.

I am interested in politics.

Dave Mustaine

To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.

Charles Babbage

My extravagance is my garden - it's the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.

Ina Garten

Strength alone knows conflict, weakness is born vanquished.

Madame Swetchine

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.

Jonathan Swift

I used to have this little mouse. I buy birds from the pet store and I let them go.

Ziggy Marley

It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter . . . This wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency . . . to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there . . . These perceptions came too late . . . I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet

The flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read all the books.

Stephane Mallarme

I've said it before, but it's absolutely true: My mother gave me my drive, but my father gave me my dreams. Thanks to him, I could see a future.

Liza Minnelli

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Ezra Pound

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.

Murray Gell-Mann

Dreams are not without meaning wherever thay may come from-from fantasy, from the elements, or from other inspiration.

Paracelsus