What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity.

Superstition is an unreasoning fear of God.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.

Dave Van Ronk

It's a damn sight harder making stuff up when you're under stress than you'd think.

J.K. Rowling

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

Gustave Flaubert

Do not say, 'It is morning,' and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.

Rabindranath Tagore

You know, the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that's healthy and indeed even creative. But it's where - it's really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky.

Tony Blair

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

Thomas Carlyle

He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning...

Ayn Rand

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

Woody Allen

There are two principles of established acceptance in morals; first, that self-interest is the mainspring of all of our actions, and secondly, that utility is the test of their value.

Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon, 182

Ye been oure lord, dooth with youre owene thyngRight as yow list.

Chaucer

Sometimes knowing what's right isn't a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.

Jodi Picoult