He smiled. He liked to imagine that she saw the beauty, that she could think outside the well-worn tracks of her countrymen, find something to like about this unsophisticated place. Because that just might mean she could find something to like about him.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Hannah Arendt

Is there a more pitiable spectacle than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which no philters and no prayers can renew when once it has fled forever?Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars.You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you if his soul be truant from you?

Ouida

The teacher reminded us that Romes liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sellexactly our own history over again.

Mark Twain

We follow the mystics. They know where they are going. They, too, go astray, but when they go astray they do so in a way that is mystical, dark, and mysterious.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

Albert Einstein

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

David Mamet

Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure

Witold Rybczynski

There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.

Charles Baudelaire

Faith and science, I have learned, are two sides of the same coin, separated by an expanse so small, but wide enough that one side can't see the other. They don't even know they're connected. Father and Lily were two sides of the same coin, I've decided, and maybe I am the space in between.

Mary E. Pearson

People aren't born good or bad. Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but its the way you live your life that matters.

Cassandra Clare

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

Henri Matisse

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

Ralph Waldo Emerson