It is the coward who fawns upon those above him. It is the coward who is insolent whenever he dares be so.

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; dies before thy uncreating word: thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; and universal darkness buries all.

Alexander Pope

My family, frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

Barack Obama

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.

John Henry Newman

To have dominion by religion, is to have dominion over men's souls, thus over their very spiritual life, and to use the Divine things, which are in their religion, as the means.

Emanuel Swedenborg

Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.

Lewis Thomas

The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing.

Yann Martel

My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.

Bob Balaban

From 18 to 22, I was alone, living in L.A. with a bunch of friends, partying.

Heath Ledger

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.

Patricia Neal

But if a person has had the sense of the Call -- the feeling that there's an adventure for him -- and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age: he's gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it's against the wrong wall.If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line. I'm not superstitious, but I do believe in spiritual magic, you might say. I feel that if one follows what I call one's bliss -- the thing that really gets you deep in your gut and that you feel is your life -- doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of.http://www.michaelherman.com/openspacetechnology/invitingorg/08campbell.html

Joseph Campbell, From An Open Li

Human history is in truth nothing but the history of the slow, uncertain, and surprising fulfillment of the Promise.

Gustavo Gutierrez

Treat your superior as a father, your equal as a brother, and your inferior as a son.

Proverb