Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant.

The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.

Christopher Hitchens

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream?

Brendan Francis

Heartache is very fertile ground for song-making but so is happiness, so is absolute bliss.

K. D. Lang

Beauty is a radiance that originates from within and comes from inner security and strong character.

Jane Seymour

You don't become a chef to become famous.

Eric Ripert

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way'.

C.S. Lewis

Love is love's reward.

John Dryden

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

Terry Eagleton

The Britons are quite separated from all the world.

Virgil

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk.

Cyril Connolly

Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ.

William Shakespeare

Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!

Thomas Carlyle