We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the intolerable compliment. Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child he will take endless trouble and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

Jonathan Sacks

Great scientists are Peter Pans, still anxious to classify and explain at an age when most people are concerned with money, power and sex.

David M. Knight

Obedience alone gives the right to command

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In parliament he again pressed the necessity of reducing expenditure. Friends warned him that he was flogging a dead horse.

John Morley

The secret of success is to realize that the crisis on our planet is much larger than just deciding what to do with your own life, and if the system under which we live the structure of western civilization begins to collapse because of our selfishness and greed, then it will make no difference whether you have $1 million dollars when the crash comes or just $1.00. The only work that will ultimately bring any good to any of us is the work of contributing to the healing of the world.

Marianne Williamson

An unsanctified temper is a fruitful source of error, and a mighty impediment to truth.

Elias Lyman Magoon

And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

Kurt Vonnegut

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans -- the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

Susan Sontag

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Oscar Wilde

I hate it when my leg falls asleep. I know that means it's going to be up all night.

Steven Wright

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken

I'm really, really lucky. I was given my dad's good genes.

Josh Brolin