I was four years old, and had long since reasoned that it was folly to expect the big things from people. It was enough to get the little things. The biggest thing, of course, was love, the nearness of somebody you love when you need somebody to be near.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

Simone Weil

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Blaise Pascal

Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.

James Baldwin

I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.

Richard M. Nixon

The problem with me, as far as getting married and having a family, is that my comedy is so important to me. So I don't know if I'll ever be as good a dad as my dad.

Adam Sandler

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Thomas Carlyle

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

Danny Glover

At the beginning of the new century, it is the common aspiration of the peoples of the two countries to deepen mutual understanding, enhance trust, develop friendship and strengthen cooperation.

Li Peng

The White House is giving George W. Bush intelligence briefings. You know, some of these jokes just write themselves.

David Letterman

Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, And in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own. Not in the morning alone, not only at mid-day he charmeth; Even at setting, the sun is still the same glorious planet.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You're alone in your ideas, because you're the only one who knows what's possible.

Bethenny Frankel

One can think of a secretary actively operating a filing system, of a librarian actively cataloguing books, of a computer actively sorting out information. The mind however does not actively sort out information. The information sorts itself out and organises itself into patterns. The mind is passive. The mind only provides an opportunity for the information to behave in this way. The mind provides a special environment in which information can become self-organising. This special environment is a memory surface with special characteristics.ISBN 0140137793 Copyright

Edward De Bono, Lateral Thinking