A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

Aristotle

If either man or woman would realize that the full power of personal beauty, it must be by cherishing noble thoughts and hopes and purposes; by having something to do and something to live for that is worthy of humanity, and which, by expanding and symmetry to the body which contains it.

Upham

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Maggie Kuhn

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

Martin Luther

If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.

Tadao Ando

if i'm going to fuck up my life, does it really matter which way i do it?.

Jodi Picoult

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

Henry A. Kissinger

Half the promises people say were never kept, were never made.

Edward W. Howe

Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.

Amy Lowell

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Working with Omarion is pretty amazing. That's like my brother. He's really cool.

Teyana Taylor