Sometimes the answer to prayer is not that it changes life, but that it changes you.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

Henry David Thoreau

There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

John Green

College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line.

Bill Gaede

By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, but music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

William Shakespeare

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me.

Henry James

Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons, and liberals who supported them.

Barney Frank

My school colors were clear. We used to say, I'm not naked, I'm in the band.

Steven Wright

Will is character in action.

William Mcdougall

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

Bertrand Russell