No man has ever risen to the real stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.

Christopher Hitchens

In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

Henry David Thoreau

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It

A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.

Lionel Strachey

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

John Green

Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Milan Kundera

Marc Jacobs is full of creative people and Louis Vuitton is again a name on the door, a name that has existed for many years but I'm a collaborator there and I bring in other people, other artists and I work with a great creative design team.

Marc Jacobs

There's pros and cons of a big church. Cons is I don't get to know everybody, I don't get to go to their ballgame, I don't get to marry everybody, but the pros are you get all this community, 800 ushers come in to serve, getting there at 7 in the morning on their day off and coming in on Saturday to make all those wafers.

Joel Osteen

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Alice Walker

Time is something you can't replace.

Nadine Gordimer

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Paul Cezanne

Character is simply habit long continued.

Plutarch