Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.

F. L. Lucas

Central to America's rise to global leadership is our Judeo-Christian tradition with the vision of the goodness and possibilities of every human life.

Mitt Romney

In fact I am quite snappy and irritable, and I don't know if I'd like to make myself worse in that respect.

Nigella Lawson

Hard work brings prosperity; playing around brings poverty.

Bible

That's one of the reasons I moved to Florida. Of course, the main reason is the weather and the training. But there's more jealousy in Switzerland because it's so little and they don't have so many athletes.

Martina Hingis

I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.

Franco Zeffirelli

I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..

John Green

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Bertrand Russell

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Rose Tremain

What is to absurd to be believed is believed because it is too absurd to be a lie.

Robert Jordan

I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.

Warren Buffett

Stay out of the sun, because it is the worst thing in terms of aging. I'm very medical. I come from a medical family.

Nicole Kidman