Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away ... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.

When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

Mark Twain

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in there jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journy of exploration and discovery.

David Almond

What the soul hardly realizes is that, unbeliever or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.

Dom Hubert Van Zeller

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

John Keats

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.

Marcus Aurelius

If a man we don't know phones us up one day and talks a little, makes no suggestions, says nothing special, but nevertheless pays us the kind of attention we rarely receive, we're quite capable of going to bed with him that night, feeling relatively in love. That's what we women are like, and there's nothing wrong with that - it's the nature of the female to open herself to love easily.

Paulo Coelho

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.

William Shakespeare

I'm not about to talk about what's romantic in my life - I figure if you talk about it once, then that's an open invitation for everyone to dig into your personal life even further. So, I just keep my private life to myself.

James Van Der Beek

Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.

Carl Sagan, In Parade, with Ann

Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we are going to show.

Mignon McLaughlin

When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed.

Marilyn Manson

The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic.

Theodor Adorno