I'm not saying it's wrong to plan for the future. I'm warning not to make today a victim of those plans.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

Honore de Balzac

Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile.

Pierre Coneille

Whether you like it or not, you're forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don't fear death, I'm a fatalist. I believe when it's your time, that's it. It's the hand you're dealt.

Clint Eastwood

There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it?

Henry James, essay The Art of Fi

I have discovered that when we least care to admit it, we feel more confused than thankful, more caught than called, more worried than gracious. In humble moments when we can no longer gloss over the roughness of life, gratitude has a way of pushing out the real soreness of feeling cheated or inadequate to the rugged realities of the world. Gratitude seemed to be a handy response to dodge the tough things for which there are no simple or comforting answers.

Patrick J. Malone, S.J., from Le

I had crossed the line. I was free but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

Harriet Tubman

What I would say to the young men and women who are beset by hopelessness and doubt is that they should go and see what is being done on the ground to fight poverty, not like going to the zoo but to take action, to open their hearts and their consciences.

Abbe Pierre

As for his name, well, what attorney wouldn't want to be able put a Judge in a crate every now and then?

Jodi Picoult

I love Nature.

Simone Bittencourt de Oliveira

There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.

John Green

To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.

Charles Dickens

Its not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.

Hans Selye