Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.

Do not let your ambitions become a sanctuary for your failures.

Bryant H. McGill

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

Confucius

Once a food becomes off-limits, then it takes on this whole other personality. 'Forbidden' is more tempting. And it becomes something evil, but food is food. It's there to nourish your body.

Valerie Bertinelli

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force. I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice, my responsibility. Win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

Elaine Maxwell

What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike.

Serge Schmemann

Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certaintiesTime unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey

She ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

Jane Austen

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Voltaire

Our heart oft times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by words, by proverbs, by signs and similitudes, as well as if one was awake.

John Bunyan

In this drawing we just let our imagination run wild. We visualized Superman toys, games, and a radio show - that was before TV - and Superman movies. We even visualized Superman billboards. And it's all come true.

Joe Shuster

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not.

George Orwell