It is only persons of firmness that can have real gentleness. Those who appear gentle are, in general, only a weak character, which easily changes into asperity.

Once, I asked my mom why stars shine. She said they werenight-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven.But when I asked my dad, he started talking about gas, and somehowI put it all together and figured that the food God served causedmultiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Jodi Picoult

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Leo Tolstoy

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

Robert H. Jackson

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

Adrienne Rich

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

But suppose we take the noun 'truth': here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation. --Austin, Papers 73.

J. L. Austin

Once you become famous, there is nothing left to become but infamous.

Don Johnson

A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

Mahatma Gandhi

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.

Stanislaw Lec

Never face facts if you do you'll never get up in the morning.

Marlo Thomas

I'd love to have children, and I think marriage is great, I really do.

Jennifer Jason Leigh