How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I like doing theaters. I like being up close and personal with the fans. It's really cool.

Ruben Studdard

We are not built for the mountains and the dawns and aesthetic affinities, those are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle. Spiritual selfishness always wants repeated moments on the mount. We feel we could talk like angels and live like angels, if only we could stay on the mount. The times of exaltation are exceptional, they have their meaning in our life with God, but we must beware lest our spiritual selfishness wants to make them the only time.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for H

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food.

Thomas Jefferson

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

Greek Proverb

I got in trouble with the police, and that was a rude awakening. That was it. I'd seen the bottom of the pit, and it was time to scrape myself out of it.

Bryan Adams

Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.

Mark Van Doren

Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power. History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.

Christopher Hitchens

Birds in their little nest agree; and 'Tis a shameful sight, when children of one family fall out, and chide, and fight.

Isaac Watts

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.

Phyllis Diller

This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.

Jodi Picoult