A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.

..It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

Neil Gaiman

Your perceptions create your reality.

Steve Maraboli

If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.

Jodi Picoult

I became very famous, as a teenager, and my name and photo were splashed in all the media. They made me larger than life, so I wanted to live larger than life, and the only way to do that was to be intoxicated.

Cat Stevens

His spiritual life has been exaggerated by a chronic attack of mental gallstones.

Oliver St. John Gogarty

Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

Hubert Humphrey

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

Bertrand Russell

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.

William Dean Howells

Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.

Felicia D. Hemans

What I was going for in the first two albums I didn't necessarily achieve. Because I was young and because it was my first time out. And the second album was such a 'quickie' sort of 'Let's just get it over with!' But the kind of music I make, there's a lot of subtlety in it. And I think it takes a couple of listens to actually really get it.

Norah Jones

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

Claude Monet