A new kind of award has been added -- the deathbed award. It is not an award of any kind. Either the recipient has not acted at all, or was not nominated, or did not win the award the last few times around. It is intended to relieve the guilty conscience of the Academy members and save face in front of the public. The Academy has the horrible taste to have a star, choking with emotion, present this deathbed award so that there can be no doubt in anybody's mind why the award is so hurriedly given. Lucky is the actor who is too sick to watch the proceedings on television.

Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God.

John Green

Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it... that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.

Dale Carnegie

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

Quentin Crisp

That's what so sad about a lot of modern music, in my opinion, so many young bands never stay around long enough to fulfill their ultimate promise. They only get halfway there or a quarter of the way there.

Alan Vega

I thought I should go to New York because it was the place to go to study. I went and tried to get an application from the Juilliard School but they wouldn't even give me one because I didn't have my high school graduation.

Maureen Forrester

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.

Carl Sagan

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

Wislawa Szymborska

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Benjamin Disraeli

Only one life, yes only one, soon will it's fleeting hours be done; Then, in that day my Lord to meet, and stand before his judgment seat; Only one life, 'twill soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last.

Missionary C. T. Studd

I'm always active in trying to educate people when it comes to eating animal products, testing on animals, and the health benefits of being vegan, although I'm probably not the best person to be talking about the latter at the moment.

Daniel Johns

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

Lillian Hellman

Not by might, or power, but by my spirit, says the Lord.

Bible