It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

Oscar Wilde

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

Virginia Woolf

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Ken Mason

Huius (sapientis) opus unum est de divinis humanisque verum invenire; ab hac numquam recedit religio, pietas, iustitia ...

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Jean Baudrillard

Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his making friends - whether he may be equally capable of retaining them is less certain.

Jane Austen

I want to be different. If everyone is wearing black, I want to be wearing red.

Maria Sharapova

The duty of helping one's self in the highest sense involves the helping of one's neighbors.

Samuel Smiles

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions... The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.

Mark Twain

My generation will actually be the first generation that is tamer than the one that came before it, and it will probably be poorer less fun and less money.

Shia LaBeouf