To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

How true Daddy's words were when he said: all children must look after their own upbringing. Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Anne Frank

People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

James Branch Cabell

I get up at 4:30 in the morning, seven days a week, no matter where I am in the world.

Bob Iger

Now, you mummy's darlings, get a rift on them boots. Definitely shine em, my little curly-headed lambs, for in our mob, war or no war, you die with clean boots on.

Gerald Kersh

I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.

George Saunders

She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.

Orson Scott Card

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

Vince Lombardi

Journalism consists largely in saying Lord James is dead to people who never knew Lord James was alive.

G. K. Chesterton

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner

Every good painter paints what he is.

Jackson Pollock

In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.

Friedrich Nietzsche