With reasonable men, I will reason with humane men I will plead but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.

The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.

James Allen

A library implies an act of faith.

Victor Hugo

There is great force hidden in a gentle command.

George Herbert

You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s.

Paul Kantner

The worst memories stick with us, while the nice ones always seem to slip through our fingers.

Rachel Vincent

Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support.

Andrew Jackson

My nickname for my mom was 'The Compass.'

Dane Cook

The voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, and act and speak as if cheerfulness wee already there. To feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and courage will very likely replace fear. If we act as if from some better feeling, the bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab and silently steals away

William Shakespeare

Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.

Andre Breton

I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.

Mark Twain

In my youth, I, too, entertained some illusions; but I soon recovered from them. The great orators who rule the assemblies by the brilliancy of their eloquence are in general men of the most mediocre political talents: they should not be opposed in their own way; for they have always more noisy words at command than you. Their eloquence should be opposed by a serious and logical argument; their strength lies in vagueness; they should be brought back to the reality of facts; practical arguments destroy them. In the council, there were men possessed of much more eloquence than I was: I always defeated them by this simple argumenttwo and two make four.

Napoleon

Why does love, even such love as he claims to practise, need the spectacle of beauty to bring it to life? What, in the abstract, do shapely legs have to do with love, or for that matter with desire? Or is that just the nature of nature, about which one does not ask questions?

J. M. Coetzee