Presents, I often say, endear absents.

I think I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

Edward W. Howe

We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.

C.S. Lewis

Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

Al Gore

What you have to decide... is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you'd want to have spent it? Listen, the truth is, nothing is guaranteed. You know that more than anybody. So dont be afraid. Be alive.

Sarah Dessen

Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

Tom Van Vleck

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

Edward Gibbon

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

Josh Billings

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

Henry Louis Gates

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

Robert Graves

The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.

Paul Gauguin

Majesty: when a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

George Bernard Shaw

I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

Jane Birkin