Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities

Eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding.

David Hume

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

Booker T. Washington

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

Philip Roth

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

Philip Pullman

Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.

Ellery Sedgwick

My principle is to do whatever is right, and leave the consequences to Him who has the disposal of them

Thomas Jefferson

Your core, lying deep within you, is what makes you what you are. Some call it the soul, the Higher Self, the true self, the being and so on. The name is unimportant once you realize that you are more than your looks and outward appearance.

Stephen Richards

The first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper.

Thomas Powers

To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

George Wald

I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It's just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions.

David Attenborough

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.

George Sheehan

Even great men bow before the Sun; it melts hubris into humility.

Dejan Stojanovic