Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

Victor Hugo

Govern a family as you would cook a small fish -- very gently.

Chinese Proverb

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Oscar Wilde

Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.

Terry Pratchett

The scientific method is nothing more than a system of rules to keep us from lying to each other.

Ken Norris

Neither blame or praise yourself.

Proverb

I didn't tell him that the diagnosis cam three months after I got my first period. Like, Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.

John Green

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Douglas Hofstadter

If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

Bill Gates

A man will do more for his stubbornness than for his religion or his country.

E. W. Howe

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

Cory Doctorow

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.

Henry David Thoreau