Elegance is refusal.

God's hand is strange to us. He cares nothing for the moment, nothing for the feeble ambitions of men and women. He sees the road that flows onward forever.

Orson Scott Card

Having learnt from experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man indubitably believes this, and always expects the law he has learnt to be fulfilled.But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it.However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the same conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as before, yet when, under the same conditions and with the same character, he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine two different courses of action in precisely the same conditions, feels that without this irrational conception (which constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels that, however impossible it may be, it is so, for without this conceptions of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single moment.He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.If the conception of freedom appears to reason a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

Leo Tolstoy

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

G. K. Chesterton

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.

Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the

I wanted to go to medical school. But, I never got a college scholarship.

Edwin Moses

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

Henry David Thoreau

I have just enough people paying attention that I have the freedom to be in charge. And I have a great record company - Nonesuch understands what I'm about.

Emmylou Harris

I'm still spending my working life trying to mine people's souls and now they're complimenting me in reviews on the amount of time I spend in the gym. On the definition of my triceps.

Jason Isaacs

Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.

Marilyn Ferguson

As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.

Buddha

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle