A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

John Masefield

My professional dreams were coming true while I was living a personal nightmare.

Dane Cook

My dad is still Christian Scientist. My mom's not, and I'm not. But I believe in God, and that there's a higher power and an intelligence that's bigger than us and that we can rely on. It's not just us, thinking we are the ones in control of everything. That idea gives me support.

Ellen DeGeneres

Friendship without self-interest is one of the rare and beautiful things of life.

James F. Byrnes

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Mix with positive-minded people as a means to tap into your unexploited potential.

Steve Backley

Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was a gross insult.

Orson Scott Card

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty?

Aldous Huxley

He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body.

Virginia Woolf

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war.

John Hospers