The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

Voltaire

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

George Saunders

Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult matter.

John Hay

Architecture worth great attention. As we double our numbers every 20 years we must double our houses. Besides we build of such perishable materials that one half of our houses must be rebuilt in every space of 20 years. So that in that term, houses are to be built for three fourths of our inhabitants. It is then among the most important arts: and it is desireable to introduce taste into an art which shews so much.

Thomas Jefferson

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Emily Dickinson

There is nothing new, but what has become antiquated.

Proverb

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one.

Thomas Paine

Pictures help you to form the mental mold...

Robert Collier

Die Sinnlichkeit übereilt oft das Wachsthum der Liebe, so dass die Wurzel schwach bleibt und leicht auszureissen ist.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I had made it somewhere special, and I'd gotten there all on my own. Nobody had given it to me. Nobody had told me to do it. I'd climbed and climbed and climbed, and this was my reward. To watch over the world, and to be alone with myself. That, I found, was what I needed.

David Levithan

Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constraining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men; they are the most deceptive beings in creation; distrust and doubt cannot stand before them; they create what they imagine; if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts; for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man -- weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded!

Marquis De Custine

I'll keep peace at all cost, even if I choke to death on my tongue.

Paula Deen