The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.

George Santayana

His passion she had expected, even his expertise, for a man of his years would not have been without women. She had even, in the long days of yearning, suspected his tenderness, which led him now to kiss her temples and the inner crook of her elbow with the same attention he gave to her lips and breasts. What she had not anticipated was that he would be vulnerable as well.

Ruth Wind

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

Alfred Austin

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

Eric Allin Cornell

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

Joseph Conrad

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Bertrand Russell

They understand but a little who understand only what can be explained.

Marie EbnerEschenbach

I seek no longer to be a 'famous' person, and instead I wish to live a 'normal' life.

Sinead O'Connor

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

Leonardo da Vinci

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Bertrand Russell