What ills from beauty spring

Greville Fane's French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. She knew it, but she didn't care; correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.

Henry James, Greville Fane from

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Samuel Johnson

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

Roger Scruton

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

Laurence Sterne

Before God we are equally wise and equally foolish.

Albert Einstein

Mental illness can happen to anybody. You can be a dustman, a politician, a Tesco worker... anyone. It could be your dad, your brother or your aunt.

Frank Bruno

Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.

Douglas Adams

When it comes down to it, it's giving people a good night out in a basic way and I think my company guarantees that. There's always something new and something to excite us and surprise us, and that's why people come back, I hope.

Matthew Bourne

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest,

Christopher Morley

It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.

Ambrose Bierce

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

Paul Theroux

Live accordingly... success isn't something you have, it's something you do.

Steve Maraboli