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.

He who has injured thee was stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

A. E. Housman

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

Christopher Hitchens

Wit and Humor -- if any difference, it is in duration -- lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage -- the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.

Mark Twain

I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable.

William Shakespeare

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

Alexander McCall Smith

I never said I wanted to be around for a long time. I always said I wanted to be here for a good time.

Kid Rock

The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To love and be loved is the great happiness of existence.

Sydney Smith

The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.

Steve Ballmer

Have a dialogue between the two opposing parts and you will find that they always start out fighting each other until we come to an appreciation of difference, ... a oneness and integration of the two opposing forces. Then the civil war is finished, and your energies are ready for your struggle with the world.

Frederick Salomon Perls

Realize that if you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it.

Anthony J. D'Angelo