The essential element in personal magnetism is a consuming sincerity -- an overwhelming faith in the importance of the work one has to do.

It's so damn hard to bloom... to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. Desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without...love,

Dean Koontz

When I was younger I used to pick things just to face the fear.

Vincent D'Onofrio

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience ... not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.

Leo Tolstoy, letter Tolstoy, Feb

It's amazing to me that young people will still pick up a cigarette.

Loni Anderson

I think the question for him is, how is a faithless person to cope with life. This is where he believes he can find something upon which to establish a literary career. You know, don't you, how often he talks of Yeats? This goes way back, to when he was very young.

Kenzaburo Oe

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Francis Bacon

Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.

Arnold Bennett

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

James Madison

Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.

Dejan Stojanovic

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

Oscar Wilde

Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion.

Neale Donald Walsch

Happiness is perfume, you can't pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself.

James Van Der Zee