Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

Nat King Cole

I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty.

Imelda Marcos

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Anita Brookner

O, wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,That has such people in't!

William Shakespeare

It is only the ignorant who despise education.

Publilius Syrus

Seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them.

Joseph Henry

I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print, but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can hardly accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

Lafcadio Hearn

Go bow thy head in gentle spite, Thou lily white, For she who spies thee waving here, With thee in beauty can compare As day with night.

James Matthews Legaré

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Virginia Woolf

Then as everything, like I say, things started to come together, when things started to go our way, that's when you results started to come. I was no different driver. I was certainly learning every time I went in the car.

Dan Wheldon