IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.

Stephen Jay Gould

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.

Victor Hugo

Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it.

Jacques Ellul

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Kurt Vonnegut

The key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.

Peter Abelard

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It's embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

Keanu Reeves

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

Henry David Thoreau

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic.

Barack Obama

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'

Gabriel Byrne

Every man has a right to be conceited until he is successful.

Benjamin Disraeli

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

Rebecca West