Too often the opportunity knocks, but by the time you push back the chain, push back the bolt, unhook the locks and shut off the burglar alarm, it's too late.

We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

John Fowles

Better good manners than good looks.

Proverb

Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things.

Denis Diderot

Could a government dare to set out with happiness as its goal? Now that there are accepted scientific proofs, it would be easy to audit the progress of national happiness annually, just as we monitor money and GDP.

Polly Toynbee

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

John Stuart Mill

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

Stephen Jay Gould

Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come

William Shakespeare

As we say in the American Institute of Wine and Food, small helpings, no seconds. A little bit of everything. No snacking. And have a good time.

Julia Child

Tyrion says that people often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.

George R. R. Martin

Women can form a friendship with a man very well; but to preserve it - to that end a slight physical antipathy must probably help.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that is so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

Henry David Thoreau

Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.

Alan Alda