The most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage.

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

Thomas Huxley

I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be ? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

Christopher Hitchens

One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.

Jean de la Bruyere

Ignorant men don't know what good they hold in their hands until they've flung it away.

Sophocles

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

Socrates

Love is enough: while ye deemed him a-sleeping, There were signs of his coming and sounds of his feet; His touch it was that would bring you to weeping, When the summer was deepest and music most sweet...

William Morris

Bring forth the horse! - the horse was brought; In truth, he was a noble steed, A Tartar of the Ukraine breed, Who look'd as though the speed of thought Were in his limbs.

Lord Byron

Darkness is only driven out with light, not more darkness.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch. The barriers are ancient -- perhaps rooted, as some paleontologist may soon discover, in the contrast between the occasional guttural utterances exchanged in male hunting bands and the extended discussions characteristic of female food-gathering groups.

Barbara Ehrenreich

He is great enough that is his own master.

Joseph Hall

My mom always taught me to be sweet and polite and cross my legs because it's what the guys like. Actually, they like a raunchy girl once in a while.

Tiffani Amber Thiessen