It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths.

Courage is a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

Willa Cather

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

George Bernard Shaw

Cosmos is God, who whispered the syllable of life.

Dejan Stojanovic

And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice, will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.

Alan Lightman

We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.

C.S. Lewis

the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

C.S. Lewis

I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal, I had an ambition to build.

John D. Rockefeller

To overcome a fear, here's all you have to do: realize the fear is there, and do the action you fear anyway.

Peter McWilliams

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

Jeff Bridges

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

Dorthea Brande

Labor disgraces no man unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.

Ulysses S. Grant