There was this huge world out there, independent of us human beings and standing before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partly accessible to our inspection and thought. The contemplation of that world beckoned like a liberation.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

Honore de Balzac

The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

George Saunders

What sort of arrogance did she have, even to imagine reaching back into the past and making changes? Who am I, she thought, if I dare to answer prayers intended for the gods?

Orson Scott Card

Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man's life happens to be placed. It shows how much good men require of us.

Henry Ward Beecher, Life of Thou

The most learned are often the most narrow minded.

William Hazlitt

An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

Booth Tarkington

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

Stephen Hawking

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Joseph Joubert

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.

Walt Whitman

The sweetest of all sounds is praise.

Xenophon

Don't do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.

Henry Rollins