A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

Muriel Spark

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

Wernher Von Braun

My heart hath often been deeply afflicted under a feeling that the standard of pure righteousness is not lifted up to the people by us, as a society, in that clearness which it might have been, had we been as faithful as we ought to be to the teachings of Christ.

John Woolman

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

Simone de Beauvoir

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

Mahatma Gandhi

Laura remarked that science was dependent upon poetry, that all scientific description was metaphoric.

Anne Rice

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Max Lerner

Growth of consciousness does not depend on the might of the intellect but on the conviction of the heart.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.

John Irving

It's best to be ruthless with the past.

Stephen King

The American education system couldn't be more badly directed or poorly funded if the Secretary of Education were Ed Wood.

Dennis Miller

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.

Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont