It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future. (J.)

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Leonardo da Vinci

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps we should comprehend these things better were it not for the persistence of the superstition that human beings habitually think. There is no more persistent superstition than this. Linn

Nicholas Murray Butler, The Revo

Playing music has always felt very natural. You know, you do try to do other things, and you do learn lessons that way, but, eventually - well... if your dad is a plumber, you become a plumber. It's the family business, and I felt like I was taking over the family business.

Dhani Harrison

It was said of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that she never puts dots over her I s, to save ink.

Horace Walpole

If you are planning on doing business with someone again, don't be too tough in the negotiations. If you're going to skin a cat, don't keep it as a house cat.

Marvin S. Levin

I've never let producers tell me what to do. Even when I was making television, I always did what I wanted to do, and if I couldn't, I didn't do it. It was a freedom that, these days, young directors starting out don't have.

Michael Haneke

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Barack Obama is the worst president in history. In my generation, we'll inherit a weakened country, drug cartels in Mexico, tax cartels in D.C. What's happened to America? I love Arizona. I was raised right. Somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place.

Ben Quayle

Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as that space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze.

James Joseph Sylvester

Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

C.S. Lewis

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.

John O'Donohue