One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.

Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.

Jonathan Sacks

A perfect wife is one who helps her husband with the dishes.

Source Unknown

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

David Mitchell

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.

Terry Pratchett

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

Peter De Vries

It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line of defence, their physical strength bent towards the single and most important task of protecting our homes and children. This meant the council had decided that our only defence was to defeat the enemy, period. Anything else meant the end of Darre.

N.K. Jemisin

Do you think we can be friends? I asked.He stared up at the ceiling. Probably not, but we can pretend.

Priya Ardis

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on I am not too sure.

H. L. Mencken

The deferring of anger is the best antidote to anger.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

George Eliot

There has never been a statue erected to the memory of someone who let well enough alone.

Jules Ellinger