I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

Mark Twain

Your emotions affect every cell in your body. Mind and body, mental and physical, are intertwined.

Thomas Tutko

Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society.

William Robertson Smith

If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. . . But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?

Lisa See

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

George Eliot

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

Christopher Hitchens

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

George Washington Carver

Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

William James

I got politics and economics moving and then others took over.

Lech Walesa

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not shew the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candlelights.

Francis Bacon

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.

Mary McLeod Bethune

I know for me the subject of how to be in a relationship is precious and complicated and challenging.

Helen Hunt