The science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

George Eliot

The strength that I have comes from irrigating the citrus plantation, ploughing in the vineyard, guarding the melon fields at night. I believe that's what gave me the strength.

Ariel Sharon

I love Joan Collins. She's a wonderful lady. She has such courage. She's such a good actress.

Robert Wagner

The Jabalites .... They worship no god; and if we in goodness of heart do send a missionary to show them the way of life, they listen with respect to all he hath to say, and then they eat him. This doth tend to hinder the spread of light.

Mark Twain

All the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My sense of religion is Einstein's sense of relativity. I don't believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.

Mandy Patinkin

Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.

Victor Borge

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

William Shakespeare

She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.

Terry Pratchett

Both my grandmothers had upright pianos, and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up, and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once, and I could play it.

Valerie Simpson

He that jokes confesses.

Italian Proverb

History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.

George Orwell, essay