Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

Confession, alas, is the new handshake.

Richard D. Rosen

Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

William James

[from ]For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.[...]The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. An historian in describing a battle says: 'The left flank of such and such an army was advanced to attack such and such a village and drove out the enemy, but was compelled to retire; then the cavalry, which was sent to attack, overthrew...' and so on. But these words have no meaning for the artist and do not actually touch on the event itself. Either from his own experience, or from the letters, memoirs, and accounts, the artist realizes a certain event to himself, and very often (to take the example of a battle) the deductions the historian permits himself to make as to the activity of such and such armies prove to be the very opposite of the artist's deductions. The difference of the results arrived at is also to be explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and the commander-in-chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles, and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame and death.

Leo Tolstoy

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any old place I can hang my hat is home sweet home to me.

William Jerome

Failure's a natural part of life.

John Malkovich

I believe in one thing only, the power of human will.

Joseph Stalin

Although initially only few in numbers, it seems my gray hairs have launched an effective peer-pressure campaign intended to convert the others.

Steve Maraboli

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train.

Phyllis McGinley

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Whatever good things we build end up building us.

Jim Rohn

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

Oscar Wilde