energy and persistence conquers all things

Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people, brings happiness.

Harold Kushner

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Thomas Carlyle

The more you make fun of yourself and don't try to go for any kind of respect, the more people seem to respect you.

James Van Der Beek

Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You can learn new things at any time in your life if you're willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you.

Barbara Sher

He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.

J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for -- because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything.

Peter Marshall

Self-love depressed becomes self-loathing.

Sally Kempton

Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.

William Mitford

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Peter Handke

In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

Jane Austen

As a child is indulged or checked in its early follies, a ground is generally laid for the happiness or misery of the future man.

Samuel Richardson