The small progress we have made after four or five weeks close attendance and continual reasonings with each other is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those republics which, having been formed with seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist.

It's not vanity to feel you have a right to be beautiful. Women are taught to feel we're not good enough, that we must live up to someone else's standards. But my aim is to cherish myself as I am.

Elle Macpherson

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.

Henry David Thoreau

Throw in the humor, throw in that personality, try things you wouldn't normally try.

Melinda Clarke

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

Salvador Dali

Now is the watchword of the wise.

Proverb

These can never be true friends: Hope, dice, a prostitute, a robber, a cheat, a goldsmith, a monkey, a doctor, a distiller.

Proverb

Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.

Anatole France

A certain recluse, I know not who, once said that no bonds attached him to this life, and the only thing he would regret leaving was the sky.

Yoshida Kenko

We cannot stop natural disasters but we can arm ourselves with knowledge: so many lives wouldn't have to be lost if there was enough disaster preparedness.

Petra Nemcova

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Raymond Chandler

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

H. L. Mencken

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson