That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

Annie Besant

Like charity, I believe glamour should begin at home.

Loretta Young

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

Rita Dove

If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Mark Twain

Fortune is ever seen accompanying industry.

Oliver Goldsmith

What the inner voice says will not disappoint the hoping soul.

Friedrich von Schiller

All intellectual improvement arises from leisure

Samuel Johnson

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please--even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Oc

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

Richard Dawkins

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed

John Green

Man is still the greatest miracle and the greatest problem on this earth.

David Sarnoff