For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival. I was convinced that the woods were calling me. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by myself by the time I'm 25, I have failed.

A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigor of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendor.

Sydney Smith

Find a voice in a whisper.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

Khaled Hosseini

What is this talked-of mystery of birth but being mounted bareback on the earth?

Robert Frost

For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.

Joyce Cary

Mother's arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies within.

Victor Hugo

If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you. The world will be yours and everything in it, what's more, you'll be a man, my son.

Rudyard Kipling

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Jacques Barzun

After all my possessions had been burned, God gave me the wisdom to return to Jerusalem.

Shmuel Y. Agnon

American public opinion is like an ocean -- it cannot be stirred by a teaspoon.

Hubert Humphrey

The melancholy truth was that his glorious golden head had nothing in it

Cecil Woodham Smith

History, insofar as it accustoms human beings to comprehend the whole of the past and to hasten forward with its conclusions into the far future, conceals the boundaries of birth and death, which enclose the life of the human being so narrowly and oppressively, and with a kind of optical illusion, expands his short existence into endless space, leading the individual imperceptibly over into humanity.

Friedrich von Schiller