How glorious it is -- and also how painful -- to be an exception.

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlaying our hard hearts.

Charles Dickens

A poor craftsman blames his tools.

Anonymous

I am persuaded, that if any attempt is made to improve the education of the poor, and such an unmanly spirit should guide the resolution of a society or committee for that purpose, it would render the design abortive.

Joseph Lancaster

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Bertrand Russell

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

Eric Hoffer

On the contrary, art consists of inventing and not copying. The Italian Renaissance is a period of artistic decadence. Those men, devoid of their predecessors' inventiveness, thought they were stronger as imitators-that is false. Art must be free in its inventiveness, it must raise us above too much reality. This is its goal, whether it is poetry or painting. The plastic life, the picture, is made up of harmonious relationships among volumes, lines, and colors. These are the three forces that must govern works of art. If, in organizing these three essential elements harmoniously, one finds that objects, elements of reality, can enter into the composition, it may be better and may give the work more richness. But they must be subordinated to the three essential elements mentioned above. Modern work thus takes a point of view directly opposed to academic work. Academic work puts the subject first and relegates pictorial values to a secondary level, if there is room.For us others, it is the opposite. Every canvas, even if nonrepresentational, that depends on harmonious relationships of the three forces-color, volume, and line-is a work of art. I repeat, if the object can be included without shattering the governing structure, the canvas is enriched.Sometimes these relationships are merely decorative when they are abstract. But if objects figure in the composition-free objects with a genuine plastic value-pictures result that have as much variety and profundity as any with an imitative subject.

Fernand Leger

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.

Chris Cleave

There's a vintage which comes with age and experience.

Jon Bon Jovi

The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

Jane Kenyon

A Woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing.She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself and only herself

Maya Angelou

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

Wilhelm Dilthey