Everything perfect in its kind has to transcend its own kind, it must become something different and incomparable. In some notes the nightingale is still a bird; then it rises above its class and seems to suggest to every winged creature what singing is truly like.

To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.

Katharine Hepburn

New Zealand needs to balance its environmental responsibilities with its economic opportunities, because the risk is that if you don't do that - and you want to lead the world - then you might end up getting unintended consequences.

John Key

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Ezra Pound

And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.

Elizabeth Gilbert

I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward.

Isabel Allende

Is there in all the history of human folly a greater fool than a clergymen in politics?

Pat Robertson

He loved the feel and smell of her palm and because he was one of those men who was always ultimately looking to dissolve himself into a woman.

Glen Duncan

Humor is not a postscript or an incidental afterthought; it is a serious and weighty part of the world's economy. One feels increasingly the height of the faculty in which it arises, the nobility of things associated with it, and the greatness of services it renders.

Oscar W. Firkins, Oscar Firkins:

I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang, Tod Browning, and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.

Michel Hazanavicius

being afraid to take chances is scarier than actually doing things that challenge you.

Simone Elkeles

Silence is the perfectos herald of joy. I were but little happy if I could say how much.

William Shakespeare

My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

Greg Iles