I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daring is not safe against daring men.

Ovid

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

H. L. Mencken

Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.

Niccolo Machiavelli

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

John Maynard Keynes

One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.

Karl Kraus

No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.

Thomas Friedman

Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.

J.K. Rowling

I saw Tequila Sunrise as a romantic picture with complex, bigger than life characters.

Conrad Hall

I was very happy in both my marriages. I was unfaithful and so were they, just like any other normal couple.

Paulo Coelho

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.

Victor Hugo