I slept and dreamt that life was beauty I woke and found that life was duty.

It demonstrates to his simple mind in the most positive manner that we have no prejudice against him on account of his race, and that while he behaves himself he will be treated the same as a white man.

George Crook

It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A bad night is not always a bad thing.

Brian W. Aldiss

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

E. M. Forster

Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.

Marguerite Duras

And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscientthat we are only 6 percent of the worlds populationthat we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankindthat we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversityand that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

No man rises so high as he knows not whither he goes.

Oliver Cromwell

Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

Virginia Woolf

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

Mary MacLane

I know I told you once that whether God exists or not, we're on our own. But when I'm with you, I'm not.

Cassandra Clare

How can we know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Begin at once to do your duty and immediately you will know what is inside you.

Johann von Goethe

I think we've been dulled by capitalism. We're just blobs now - we're so worried about how we can keep paying the lease on the car, the mortgage, the lease on the toaster and all that. You can't really think about much else. If you lose that, you lose the whole lot.

Rupert Everett