Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead therefore we must learn both arts.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

Jonathan Swift

my idea of good company.. is the company of clever, well-informed people. who have a great deal of conversation.

Jane Austen

Self-help books are making life downright unsafe. Women desperate to catch a man practice all the ploys recommended by these authors. Bump into him, trip over him, knock him down, spill something on him, scald him, but meet him.

Florence King

the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.

Virginia Woolf

Another cause of change, one less noticeable but fundamental, is the modern growth of population closely connected with scientific and medical discoveries. It is interesting that the United Nations has set up a special Commission to study this question.

Emily Greene Balch

Let us take things as we find them: let us not attempt to distort them into what they are not... We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must use them.

John Henry Newman

But it is very foolish to ask questions about any young ladies about any three sisters just grown up; for one knows, without being told, exactly what they are all very accomplished and pleasing, and one very pretty. There is a beauty in every family. It is a regular thing

Jane Austen

We have no more right to put our discordant states of mind into the lives of those around us and rob them of their sunshine and brightness than we have to enter their houses and still their silverware.

Julia Moss Seton

I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me; but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.

William Pitt

Out, you tallow-face! You baggage!

William Shakespeare

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

Quentin Crisp

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

Antoine Rivarol