How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?

He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.

Henry Ward Beecher

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing -- all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art -- at the door.

Konstantin Stanislavisky

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

There was no 'before' the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.

John D. Barrow

One would give generous alms if one had the eyes to see the beauty of a cupped receiving hand.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.

Mark Twain

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

Boris Pasternak

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed

Sir William Temple

Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

Denis Diderot

A year ago I had a back injury and followed a good nutrition program to help speed up my recovery. I focused on exercise and staying healthy in order to get back out on the ice.

Sasha Cohen

I have laid aside business, and gone a'fishing.

Izaak Walton

It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Hubert H. Humphrey