What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

Unto Thee, O Lord, the Soul of Creation cried: For whom didst Thou create me, and who so fashioned me? Feuds and fury, violence and the insolence of might have oppressed me; None have I to protect me save Thee; Command for me then the blessings of a settled, peaceful life.

Zoroaster

If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you've made.

Jodi Picoult

Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Milan Kundera

I enjoy being single, but I loved being married.

Stephanie Mills

A plane is a bad place for an all-out sleep, but a good place to begin rest and recovery from the trip to the faraway places you've been, a decompression chamber between Here and There. Though a plane is not the ideal place really to think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice.

Shana Alexander

I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.

Barbra Streisand

I challenge you to be dreamers I challenge you to be doers and let us make the greatest place in the world even better.

Brian Schweitzer

We must substitute courage for caution.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.

Nikolai Gogol

Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing.

Sir Joshua Reynolds

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

Henry David Thoreau