The devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles, flees before the sound of music almost as much as before the Word of God....Music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men. Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful. Then one forgets all wrath, impurity, and other devices.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

John W. Gardner

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

A. R. Ammons

Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

Anton Chekhov

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man to be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does.

Jane Austen

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, - superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I have my family, my children - I have a lot of outside activities.

Carlos Ghosn

You just can't complain about being alive. It's self-indulgent to be unhappy. When asked how she has coped since husband's death.

Gena Rowland

If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science. That will be the science of Christianity.

Sam Harris

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Jean Baudrillard

But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.

Oliver Wendell Holmes