There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place

George Santayana, letter to Mary

For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it , it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers...This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me.

Albert Camus

I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep.

Pierre De Beaumarchais

You cannot do anything without God.It's a profound and elemental truth. Not, you cannot do most things without God. You will not be able to do anything that you want, truly, in fulfillment, without God.

Marco Rubio

A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.

Rudyard Kipling

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

Diane Wakoski

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

Roberto Burle Marx

No one can be a replacement for another person. That is why, farewells are always difficult.

Matsuri Hino

Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

Terry Pratchett

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.

Richard Dawkins

I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.

John Henry Carver