Something must be done when you find an opposing set of desires of this kind well to the fore in your category of strong desires. You must set in operation a process of competition, from which one must emerge a victor and the other set be defeated.

Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

Albert Camus

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

John le Carre

I didn't want to be thirtysomething and not know what I was going to do. I was quite afraid of that, there were quite a lot of aimless kids around, in that 'other' side of my life, who didn't really know what to do because they always had a bank balance to fall back on and they were quite lost.

Stella McCartney

Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings. A man dies still if he has done nothing, as the one who has done much.

Homer, Iliad

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts -- the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

John Ruskin

He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices he is free and nothing holds him back.

Henri Matisse

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

For the sake of argument and illustration I will presume that certain articles of ordinary diet, however beneficial in youth, are prejudicial in advanced life, like beans to a horse, whose common ordinary food is hay and corn.

William Banting

Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances.

Sandra Day O'Connor

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.

Phil Ochs

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

Ronald Reagan

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Arthur Conan Doyle