Too much good fortune can make you smug and unaware. Happiness should be like an oasis, the greener for the desert that surrounds it.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

Patti Smith

Believe me when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after life, with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams; and that waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and moral stature, beyond your darkest reckoning.

William Ewart Gladstone, The Lif

There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.

Friedrich von Schiller

I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10 % of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.

Berke Breathed

You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not for the world.

Mark Twain

He knew one of the women well, and had shared his universe with her. They had seen the same mountains, and the same trees, although each of them had seem them differently. She knew his weaknesses, his moments of hatred, of despair. Yet she was there at his side. They shared the same universe.

Paulo Coelho

To have the chance to see your music be elevated and to have almost universally positive response to that music, makes me feel better every day. I feel more confident and inspired, and that's fun.

John Legend

A young man is a theory, an old man is a fact.

Edward W. Howe

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

Sinclair Lewis

We are near, very near, to an end to the eurozone crisis... The worst - in the sense of the fear of the eurozone breaking up - is over. But the best isn't there yet.

Francois Hollande

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Oscar Wilde

As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.

Mervyn Peake