A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

David Mitchell

The relationship of the toastmaster to the speaker should be the same as that of the fan to the fan dancer. It should call attention to the subject without making any particular effort to cover it.

Adlai Stevenson

It's so easy to grow apart marriage takes work.

Courteney Cox

Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin; to say that you are weak, or others are weak.

Swami Vivekananda

He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart. She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.

Leo Tolstoy

The free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.

Leon Blum

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

James Russell Lowell

Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.This text appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star on Oct. 29, 1887, in a column by Dr. Henry A. Smith. Smith took notes as Seattle spoke and created this text in English from those notes.

Chief Seattle, text of Chief Sea

Trees that grow in smoggy cities are needed to make carbonpaper.

Steven Wright

Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.

Malala Yousafzai

But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

George Eliot

Christmas carols always brought tears to my eyes. I also cry at weddings. I should have cried at a couple of my own.

Ethel Merman