How the mother is to be pitied who hath handsome daughters! Locks, bolts, bars, and lectures of morality are nothing to them: they break through them all. They have as much pleasure in cheating a father and mother, as in cheating at cards.

Find fault with thyself rather than with others.

Ieyasu Tokugawa

I came from a real tough neighborhood. Why every time I shut the window I hurt somebody's fingers.

Rodney Dangerfield

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

Neil Gaiman

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim.

William Feather, The Business of

Actresses can get outrageously precious about the way they look. That's not what life's about. If you starve yourself to the point where your brain cells shrivel, you will never do good work. And if you're overly conscious of your arms flapping in the wind, how can you look the other actor in the eye to respond to them?

Cate Blanchett

Yes, there is Nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem

Kahlil Gibran

Stress and worry, they solve nothing. What they do is block creativity. You are not even able to think about the solutions. Every problem has a solution.

Susan L. Taylor

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.

W. E. B. Du Bois

There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.

David Puttnam

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

George Bernard Shaw

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal -- every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open -- this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

Washington Irving