Public lives are lived out on the job and in the marketplace, where certain rules, conventions, laws, and social customs keep most of us in line. Private lives are lived out in the presence of family, friends, and neighbors who must be considered and respected even though the rules and proscriptions are looser than what's allowed in public. But in our secret lives, inside our own heads, almost anything goes.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

Ethel Waters

When I left HEEP I didn't know what I wanted! It took me a long time to adjust to life away from the band and the only thing I knew was that I didn't want to repeat my mistakes!

Ken Hensley

I used my imagination to make the grass whatever color I wanted it to be.

Whoopi Goldberg

We are the prisoners of ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would awake at sunrise, and without washing or dressing sit down before the easel which stood right beside my bed. Thus the first image I saw on awakening was the painting I had begun, as it was the last I saw in the evening when I retired . . . I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to 'see', like a medium (very much so indeed), the images that would spring up in my imagination. Often I saw these images exactly situated in the painting. Then, at the point commanded by them, I would paint, paint with the hot taste in my mouth that panting hunting dogs must have at the moment when they fasten their teeth into the game killed that very instant by a well-aimed shot. At times I would wait whole hours without any such images occuring. Then, not painting, I would remain in suspense, holding up one paw, from which the brush hung motionless, ready to pounce again upon the oneiric landscape of my canvas the moment the next explosion of my brain brought a new victim of my imagination bleeding to the ground.

Salvador Dali, My Secret Life

History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

Edward Gibbon

Food in Chicago is the best.

Lee DeWyze

The sculptor will chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel. Nature will chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities. She will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways, if she can develop a little character, Everything must give way to that. Wealth is nothing, position is nothing, fame is nothing, manhood is everything.

Orison Swett Marden

I had a friend whose family had dinner together. The mother would tuck you in at night and make breakfast in the morning. They even had a spare bike for a friend. It just seemed so amazing to me.

Moon Unit Zappa

People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them.

Leo Tolstoy

I'm just part of a tradition of people who aren't pleased. I would never think anyone else who has the same attitude was getting it from me. I'd just think they're... sensible.

Jack Dee

God's providence is on the side of clear heads.

Henry Ward Beecher