If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean even if it did build muscle whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.

The lopsided attitudes of college professors pose a serious challenge to learning because students are so susceptible to becoming lopsided sheep.

Suzanne Fields

The Occupy movement needs an organizing principle, and - just as the Tea Party did - it needs some actual measures of success. Choose one candidate whose agenda is squarely within that of the movement and make his or her electoral success a focal point.

Eliot Spitzer

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

Galileo Galilei

My Botswana books are positive, and I've never really sought to deny that. They are positive. They present a very positive picture of the country. And I think that that is perfectly defensible given that there is so much written about Africa which is entirely negative.

Alexander McCall Smith

The Germans are the most philosophic people in the world, and the greatest smokers: now I trace their philosophy to their smoking. Smoking has a sedative effect upon the nerves, and enables a man to bear the sorrows of this life (of which every one has his share) not only decently, but dignifiedly.

George Borrow

Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Charlotte Bronte

I mean, I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time, then you're considered a failure. But it's like, 'Well, are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?'

Kristen Stewart

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

Robert Browning

Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of proven criminals?

Ogden Nash

Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work.

J.K. Rowling

No man chooses evil because it is evil he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Mary Wollstonecraft