Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.

I play with my grandchildren. I tend to my garden, which I love. Of course, I love to read, and family is really what it's all about.

Julie Andrews

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope

Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do -- can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music. You know what to do.

Barbara Sher

Opinions are made to be changed --or how is truth to be got at?

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

God is a reality of spirit... He cannot... be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.

Bertrand Russell

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

Carol Ann Duffy

If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that his operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give him our confidence in spite of this.

C.S. Lewis

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

Alexis de Tocqueville

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

Virginia Woolf

Major sports are major parts of society. It's not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.

William Gibson

Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response.

Mildred Barthel