Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality, says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

George Washington

A clever, imagination, humorous request can open closed doors and closed minds.

Percy Ross

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

Aldous Huxley

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

Marcel Proust

As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts thought from action.

Shoshana Zuboff

I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.

John Cleese

People really feel that, when they go to the gas pump now, that the oil cartel is holding them by the legs and tipping them upside down and shaking money out of their pockets.

Ed Markey

Lawyers are the first refuge of the incompetent.

Aaron Allston

If you do your research on hot springs all over the world, they're usually places of peace. People, even in warring nations and so forth, they'll go and live in peace together around the hot springs, which were always considered medicinal. I firmly believe in water therapy.

Larry Hagman

Accept yourself as you are. Otherwise you will never see opportunity. You will not feel free to move toward it; you will feel you are not deserving.

Maxwell Maltz

We are not worshipping anyone or anything, we are simply communing with creation.

Paulo Coelho

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

Anton Chekhov