Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion improves by observing, that the most swift are usually the least manageable and the most likely to stray from the course. Great abilities have always been less serviceable to the possessors than moderate ones.

After all, I think, isn't it always about a boy?

Emily Giffin

When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.

Irving Layton

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

Henry James

My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.

Albert Einstein

Her body accepted my brutal seed and took it to swell within, just as the patient earth accepts a falling fruit into its tender soil to cradle and nourish it to grow. Came a time, just springtime last, our infant child pushed through the fragile barrier of her womb. Her legs branched out, just as the wood branches out from these eternal trees around us; but she was not hardy as they. My wife groaned with blood and ceased to breathe. Aye!, a scornful eve that bred the kind of pain only a god can withstand.

Roman Payne

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Graham Greene

Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

C.S. Lewis

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

Horace

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face.

George Orwell

All that I am I owe to Jesus Christ, revealed to me in His divine Book.

David Livingstone

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Terry Brooks

Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

Jean Anouilh