Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.

Fear is that thing that keeps you up there on that other plateau. Fear is that thing that just keeps you closed down, and quite frankly, alone.

Andrew Shue

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

C.S. Lewis

When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.

Tony Visconti

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that whatever you say to them, they always purr.

Lewis Carroll

The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.

Orson Scott Card

He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life.

Henri Frederic Amiel

It's quite nice to see that I didn't have to change who I was to reach two very different types of people.

Marc Jacobs

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

Edward Hoagland

My passion for ideas is not matched with a passion for partisan or electoral politics.

Jack Kemp

If efforts to do social work are couched in selfish motives, then they will die a premature death. Why would my efforts get politicised? I have values I inherited from my father. He helped many. Anyone, even a postman knocking on our door would get a glass of water and some sweets.

Sachin Tendulkar

A lot of times people look at the negative side of what they feel they can't do. I always look on the positive side of what I can do.

Chuck Norris

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Adrienne Rich