Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason ;knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.

Steps are what you take when you think you have forever.

Nicholas Lore, The Pathfinder

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

Thomas Mann

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right

Mark Twain

Anger elicits anger, fear elicits fear, no matter how well meaning we may be.

Martha Beck

Art seduces, but does not exploit.

Mason Cooley

In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination.

James Buchan

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

John Updike

Polite conversation is rarely either.

Fran Lebowitz

The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context. What price we may have paid for this comfort in the way of false security and accepted confusion of the thought is another matter.

C.S. Lewis

Must is a hard nut to crack, but it has a sweet kernel.

C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon

For five months I got up at six o'clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my stunt for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school. When people say to me, as they occasionally do, 'Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do', I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Labor is sweet, for Thou hast toiled, And care is light, for Thou hast cared; Let not our works with self be soiled, Nor in unsimple ways ensnared. Through life's long day and death's dark night, O gentle Jesus! be our light.

Frederick William Faber