Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.

The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.

Benjamin Spock

Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is perilous.

Confucius

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Cham

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Henry David Thoreau

You have to just go with your imagination, where your instinct takes you.

Peter Mullan

The question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had means, time, influence, and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has.

Hamilton Wright Mabie

It is most necessary to avoid rusticity in any way, whether in material, design, or execution.

George Edmund Street

There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.

Jodi Picoult

Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.

John Burroughs

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

Victor Hugo

I feel like 35. At 35 you're old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with the knowledge. So I stayed at 35!

Michael Caine

While I'm not a celebrity, it's such a weird concept that society has cooked up for us. Astronauts and teachers are much more amazing than actors.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt