In a culture of hyper-consumption the advertising industry has brainwashed many people into believing they can raise their status just by driving a particular brand of whatever it is they are pushing at you.

O suns and skies and clouds of June, and flowers of June together. Ye cannot rival for one hour October's bright blue weather.

Helen Hunt Jackson

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.

Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature then we the pedant.

Confucius

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

Victor Hugo

Diligence is the mother of good luck.

Benjamin Franklin

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Gaston Bachelard

We like to see others, but don't like others to see through us.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence ... too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.

Thomas Jefferson

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.

Orson Welles

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

George Bernard Shaw

There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one--on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful--as usual--will shout for the war. The pulpit will--warily and cautiously--object--at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, 'It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.' Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers--as earlier--but do not dare say so. And now the whole nation--pulpit and all--will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Mark Twain