Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey

My progress was rendered delightful by the sylvan elegance of the groves, chearful meadows, and high distant forests, which in grand order presented themselves to view.

William Bartram

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent -- for every effect a perfect cause -- and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your manuscript is both good and original but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Samuel Johnson

I wouldn't trust Nixon from here to that phone.

Barry Goldwater

There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle over the gas ring.

C.S. Lewis

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

Agnes Repplier

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

Walter Gropius

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

Elie Wiesel

The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.

Abraham Lincoln

Hope is a great falsifier. Let good judgment keep her in check.

Baltasar Gracian

It won't take 40 years for opposition to same-sex marriage to dissipate.

Mary Cheney