If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Half the time men think they are talking business, they are wasting time.

E. W. Howe

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.

Ouida

Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he'd learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.

Cassandra Clare

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

Virginia Woolf

Where gold speaks every tongue is silent.

Italian Proverb

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.

Christopher Hitchens

No cause is helpless if it is just. Errors, no matter how popular, carry the seeds of their own destruction.

John W. Scoville

Não estatize meus sentimentos. Pra seu governo, o meu estado é independente.

Renato Russo

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.

Neil Gaiman

The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.

Salman Rushdie

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

M. H. Abrams

When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public.

Elena Kagan