Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

Thomas Hobbes

Time has no division to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire pistols.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

He who never sacrificed a present to a future good or a personal to a general one can speak of happiness only as the blind do of colors.

Olympia Brown

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.

A. J. P. Taylor

It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.

Hugo Black

The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.

Henry Miller

And what is a stage dad, or a stage mom? It's someone who's protective. That's all.

Nigel Lythgoe

Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four-hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt.

Eldridge Cleaver

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln

I think I'm learning to be bolder in my career choices and be more confident in my personal life. I haven't always felt very secure as an individual, but now I feel I certain confidence and sense of self that gets me through the day a lot better than before.

Winona Ryder

What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.

Albert Brooks