Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

Frank Zappa

The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual.

Walt Whitman

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

John Ruskin

Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.

George MacDonald

Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.

Norman McLaren

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.

Rose Wilder Lane

Tranquility is the old man's milk

Thomas Jefferson

Life is a wilderness of twists and turns, where faith is your only compass.

Paul Santaguida

It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.

Samuel Johnson

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

...and yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart. Scenes had passed in Uppercross which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear. She left it all behind her, all but the recollection that such things had been.

Jane Austen