I love giving gifts and I love receiving them. I really like giving little kids extravagant gifts. You see their little faces light up and they get excited. If it's a really good gift, I love receiving it, like jewels, small islands.

Too many people miss the silver lining because they're expecting gold.

Maurice Setter

My favorite hobby is being alone. I like to be alone. I also like dancing, fishing, playing poker sometimes and vegetable gardening - corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, I have a big garden every year.

Emanuel Steward

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.

Oscar Wilde

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

E. O. Wilson

The media no longer ask those who know something to share that knowledge with the public. Instead they ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimate it.

Serge Daney

He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.

LaoTzu

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God's anger but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex.

Adam Sedgwick

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing

We all want to be happy, and we're all going to die. You might say those are the only two unchallengeably true facts that apply to every human being on this planet.

William Boyd

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

Raymond Carver

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Jose Ortega y Gasset