A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement -- in a word, with more renunciation than you care for -- and so you flee the contagion.

We live and breathe words.

Cassandra Clare

Service a smile. ? It is an acknowledging wave, a reaching handshake, a friendly wink, and a warm hug. ? It's these simple acts that matter most, because the greatest service to a human soul has always been the kindness of recognition.

Richelle E. Goodrich

If you want to take your mission in life to the next level, if you're stuck and you don't know how to rise, don't look outside yourself. Look inside. Don't let your fears keep you mired in the crowd. Abolish your fears and raise your commitment level to the point of no return, and I guarantee you that the Champion Within will burst forth to propel you toward victory.

Bruce Jenner

With publicity comes humiliation.

Tama Janowitz

One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.

Ernest Hemingway

He conquers who endures.

Persius

If someone were to prove to me -- right this minute -- that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior.

Luis Bunuel

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions know that you are alone in the world.

Henry David Thoreau

And let us not remember Italy the less regardfully, because, in every fragment of her fallen Temples, and every stone of her deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate the lesson that the wheel of Time is rolling for an end, and that the world is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing, and more hopeful, as it rolls!

Charles Dickens

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.

J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter to Mich

Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.

Ernest Hemingway

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

Giambattista Vico