If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

In youth, it was a way I had,To do my best to please.And change, with every passing ladTo suit his theories.But now I know the things I knowAnd do the things I do,And if you do not like me so,To hell, my love, with you.

Dorothy Parker

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.

Christopher Hitchens

No one keeps a secret so well as a child

Victor Hugo

Thou shalt not covet; but tradition approves all forms of competition.

Arthur H. Clough

Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims.

James Q. Wilson

When we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, and opening quotation is a symphony precluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.

Benjamin Disraeli

Choose your wife as you wish your children to be.

Proverb

I wanted to make sure that the man who found the genie would not take terrible advantage of her, so he needed to be a person of integrity and honor - which is why I made the male lead an astronaut. The rest, as they say, is history.

Sidney Sheldon

My dad always taught me to never be satisfied, to want more and know that what is done is done.

Thierry Henry

He was attractive. I knew that. And I knew that attractive people always got away with things.

David Levithan

Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes... just be an illusion.

Javan