Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they may.

Bitter experience has taught us how fundamental our values are and how great the mission they represent.

Jan Peter Balkenende

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

E. O. Wilson

I was about 14, and my friend's stepdad asked me to do a 10K with him because his son - who was more into basketball - didn't want to. It was amazing, and I still remember the time I got: 48:23.

Sean Astin

It's okay if you want to go. Everyone wants you to stay. I want you to stay more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. But that's what I want and I could see why it might not be what you want. So I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It's okay if you have to leave us. It's okay if you want to stop fighting.

Gayle Forman

I am here to seduce you into a love of life; to help you to become a little more poetic; to help you die to the mundane and to the ordinary so that the extraordinary explodes in your life.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

Voltaire

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Guillaume Apollinaire

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

Samuel Johnson

Religion is a mixed blessing.

John Shelby Spong

Love has different shades. Like the way I loved Cassia when I thought she'd never love me. The way I loved her on the Hill. The way I love her now that she came into the canyon for me. It's different. Deeper. I thought I loved her and wanted her before, but as we walk through the canyon together I realize this could be more than a new shade. A whole new color.

Ally Condie

Eagerly, musician,Sweep your string,So we may sing,Elated, optative,Our several voicesInterblending,Playfully contending,Not interferingBut co-inhering,For all withinThe cincture of the soundIs holy ground,Where all are Brothers,None faceless Others. Let mortals bewareOf words, forWith words we lie,Can say peaceWhen we mean war,Foul thought speak fairAnd promise falsely,But song is true:Let music for peaceBe the paradigm,For peace means to changeAt the right time,As the World-Clock,Goes Tick and Tock. So may the storyOf our human cityPresently moveLike music, whenBegotten notesNew notes beget,Making the flowingOf time a growing,Till what it could be,At last it is,Where even sadnessIs a form of gladness,Where Fate is Freedom,Grace and Surprise.

W. H. Auden

There is no course of life so weak and Scottish as that which is ordered by orders, method, and discipline.

Michel de Montaigne