Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the universal laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rock-like. But because it is so deep we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it.

If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out.

Arthur Koestler

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

Haruki Murakami

In studying mathematics or simply using a mathematical principle, if we get the wrong answer in sort of algebraic equation, we do not suddenly feel that there is an anti-mathematical principle that is luring us into the wrong answers.

Eric Butterworth

There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you -- if you don't repeat it.

Pearl Bailey

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

Tom Waits

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

Raoul Vaneigem

Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy.

William Gilmore Simms

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

John Kenneth Galbraith

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

Virginia Woolf

It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.

William Penn

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning.

Albert Camus