You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.

I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.

Patrick Stewart

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

George Eliot

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

Jonathan Kozol

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks--we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.

Parker J. Palmer

France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.

Charles de Gaulle

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Henry David Thoreau

My Saviour! fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my clumsy hand has drawn of a Divine life, with the fullness of Thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty I cannot realize; robe me in Thine unutterable purity.

Frederick William Robertson

The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.

Abraham Lincoln

I have made an important discovery... that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effect of intoxication.

Oscar Wilde

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

Desiderius Erasmus

The father who does not teach his son his duties is equally guilty with the son who neglects them.

Confucius

I felt, as I have often felt, that my failing the truth could have no bearing at all on the Truth itself, which could never conceivably be in any sense dependent on me or on anyone.

Marilynne Robinson