I was focused on athletics, outdoors, sports.

The very greatest things - great thoughts, discoveries, inventions - have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.

Samuel Smiles

This is a game. That's all it is. It's not a war.

Jack Nicklaus

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

Jorge Luis Borges

This is the sum of all -- righteousness. In causing pleasure or in giving pain, in doing good or injury to others, a man obtains a proper rule of action by looking at his neighbor as himself.

The Mahabharta

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Thomas Wolfe

Peter Ustinov was the first really positive influence in my career. He was real and he bore witness to it. The things he said to you, he lived them.

Terence Stamp

The more equality women have, the fairer, more civilized and tolerant society will be. Sexual equality is a lot more effective against terrorism than military strength.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.

SunTzu

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.

Gloria Steinem

And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.

Kurt Vonnegut

The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say there were not pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, without there being a tolerable face among them. ... But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!

Jane Austen

The beliefs I was raised with - to respect animals and to be aware of nature, to understand that we share this planet with other creatures - have had a huge impact on me.

Stella McCartney