Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Eliot

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

Donald Knuth

Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.

Plutarch

Life lived amidst tension and busyness needs leisure. Leisure that recreates and renews. Leisure should be a time to think new thoughts, not ponder old ills.

C. Neil Strait

I would go visit my mom on Sundays, and my brother was working on stuff. I'd go in there and sing a little melody, then we started working with words and the next thing you know it was just born organically without really trying.

Taryn Manning

I will go tell him of Hermia's flight:Then to the wood will he to-morrow nightPursue her; and for this intelligenceIf I have thanks, it is a dear expense:But herein mean I to enrich my pain, To have his sight thither and back again.

William Shakespeare

You live in this shadow that you're going to burn in Hell until you're saved. And I still worry about it a little. I don't believe in Heaven, but I do still fear Hell.

Beth Ditto

I'm definitely doing better. I never realized that I would get the support that I've gotten from everybody - from my fans, to people that I've idolized my whole life. So it's overwhelming, it's amazing and I believe that everything happens for a reason so I'm in a really good place right now.

Pia Toscano

I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake, for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Walt Whitman

The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.

Thomas Mann, From the Introducti

You get what you give, but also what you're willing to take.

Sarah Dessen

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take places at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the caster oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays c

George Orwell