The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Margaret Mead

Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.

Lily Tomlin

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.

C.S. Lewis

Forgiveness is not to give the other person peace. Forgiveness is for you. Take that opportunity.

Mackenzie Phillips

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

C.S. Lewis

A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard wordsbruise the heart of a child.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The test of man is how well he is able to feel about what he thinks. The test of a woman is how well she is able to think about what she feels.

Mary Mcdowell

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.

George Weinberg

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

Lewis Mumford

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

Milan Kundera

I've come to the conclusion that beautiful women in the West aren't comfortable finding strength in their femininity. They want to do masculine-oriented things to establish their femininity. It's a contradiction.

Wesley Snipes

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

Lawrence Clark Powell