A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.

The best generals I have known were... stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes -- love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.

Leo Tolstoy

No one was ever lost on a straight road.

Proverb

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

Ken Burns

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.

George Bernard Shaw

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Katherine Mansfield

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

Samuel Johnson

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Leo Tolstoy

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

Tom Stoppard

By the Quiet Moment, if you want to be woken by emptiness, Just open your mind, and your heart will meet something... it always has something there.

Suka

To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

Bell Hooks

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

Maxim Gorky

As falls the dew on quenchless sands, blood only serves to wash ambition's hands.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron