By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of troubles now past, and which I no longer feel.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Willa Cather

There's not a whole lot of new atoms out there.

Denny McDonough

As everyone in Louisiana knows, there was often no communication or coordination between the state and federal government in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Bobby Jindal

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

Søren Kierkegaard

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.

Karl Rahner

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even-if you will-eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.

Joseph Brodsky, Commencement Add

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Willia

What is the use of your pedigrees?

Juvenal

If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, O

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin