Detachment does not consist in setting fire to one's house, or becoming bankrupt or throwing one's fortune out of the window, or even giving away all of one's possessions. Detachment consists in refraining from letting our possessions possess us.

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real.

Thomas Merton

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't want to run around and look at a shot through a monitor. That doesn't improve what I'm trying to do. I figure, once I've done my job, it's none of my business.

Johnny Depp

Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of what is already known. Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

Susan Sontag

The one thing you've got to say about Columbia is that it has courses that are famous. It has alumni who come back and say it was the best thing they ever did.

William Scott

A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.

Jeremy Taylor

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Eugene Ionesco

I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful, much adulated, very famous and very unhappy.

Brigitte Bardot

I was frustrated out of my mind, trying to figure out the will of God. I was doing everything but getting into the presence of God and asking Him to show me.

Paul Little

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Blaise Pascal

Maybe it's just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows maybe even tomorrow.

Haruki Murakami