My mama always used to tell me: 'If you can't find somethin' to live for, you best find somethin' to die for.'

I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it? Not in the first generation, he said, but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.

Plato

Unhappiness does not come from the way things are, but from the difference between how things are and how we think they should be

Creflo A. Dollar

We assemble parliaments and councils, to have the benefit of their collected wisdom; but we necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices, and private interests. By the help of these, artful men overpower their wisdom, and dupe its possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, arrets, and edicts, all the world over, for regulating commerce, an assembly of great men is the greatest fool upon earth.

Benjamin Franklin

For us to think we can enjoy, understand and practice the Christian religion with just Matthew to Revelation is foolishness.

Randall Terry

I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

Janet Fitch

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

George Orwell

Those who marry God can become domesticated too -- it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word Love means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and Ave Maria like dearest is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves -- it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.

Graham Greene

It's funny to be discovered by a lot of people who didn't know you before. People always used to say, 'Do you shop at Home Depot?' or 'Does your kid go to such and such school?' They want to know why they know me, even if they don't know my name. I don't think that's a bad thing, by the way I think it's nice to be kind of anonymously famous.

Terry O'Quinn

Beauty is variable, ugliness is constant.

Douglas Horton

I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar Chapt

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.

Alfred Adler