The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

The sure way to be cheated is to think one's self more cunning than others.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Questa luce, cioè la storia, è spietata; essa ha questo di strano e di divino, e cioè che quantunque sia luce, e precisamente perché è luce, mette spesso dell'ombra l? dove si vedono raggi; dello stesso uomo fa due fantasmi differenti, e l'uno attacca l'altro, e ne fa giustizia, e le tenebre del despota lottano con lo splendore del capitano. Da qui, una misura più vera nell'apprezzamento definitivo dei popoli. Babilonia violata diminuisce Alessandro; Roma incatenata diminuisce Cesare; Gerusalemme uccisa diminuisce Tito. La tirannia segue il tiranno. E' una sventura per un uomo lasciare dietro di sé dell'ombra che ha la forma sua.

Victor Hugo

I try to forget about the expectation that's out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I'm not trying to please them. I've spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist.

Chuck Palahniuk

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up... a lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

Helen Hayes

Press on. Obstacles are seldom the same size tomorrow as they are today.

Robert H. Schuller

You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.

Ernest Hemingway

He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric.

George Eliot

Fortune favors the bold, but abandons the timid.

Proverb

Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children

John Green

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything

Albert Einstein

A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

Eleanor Roosevelt

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.

Oscar Wilde