Every life is its own excuse for being.

Prophecy today is hardly the romantic business that it used to be. The old tools of the trade, like the sword, the hair shirt, and the long fast in the wilderness, have given way to more contemporary, mundane instruments of doom --the book, the picket and the petition, the sit-in at City Hall.

Jane Kramer

Believe in yourself, listen to your gut, and do what you love.

Dylan Lauren

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.

Thomas Carruthers

Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.

Abraham Lincoln

The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Carl Sandburg

Now I'm way into suits that I can put on whether I took a shower or not, and wear barefoot and paint my toes black or whatever color the suit is. It's very cool to wear suits like that. Roll up the sleeves and just say yee-haw.

Steven Tyler

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

Alfred Hitchcock

That makes me think, my friend, as I have often done before, how natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen.

Plato

When you have mastered fear then you have mastered all.

Stephen Richards

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

Arthur Erickson

I'd like you to know that I have forgiven him. Again and again. Once done, course, back comes the Enemy to persecute and persecute, and I must ante up to God and forgive yet again.

Jan Karon