Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

If I'm working on a film, I'll do sit-ups for before I shoot. Like, 100 in the morning or something.

James Franco

You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.

Malcolm X

Life lived amidst tension and busyness needs leisure. Leisure that recreates and renews. Leisure should be a time to think new thoughts, not ponder old ills.

C. Neil Strait

Recommend virtue to your children it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

Ludwig van Beethoven

What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.

John O'Donohue

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

Henry David Thoreau

An old man turned ninety-eightHe won the lottery and died the next dayIt's a black fly in your ChardonnayIt's a death row pardon two minutes too lateIt's a traffic jam when you're already lateIt's a no-smoking sign on your cigarette breakIt's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knifeIt's meeting the man of my dreamsAnd then meeting his beautiful wife.

Alanis Morissette, Song Ironic

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

Leo Tolstoy

You speak of Lord Byron and me there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

John Keats

There is an element of truth in every idea that lasts long enough to be called corny.

Irving Berlin

It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.

Virginia Woolf