...the story of a man who saw three fellows laying bricks at a new building:He approached the first and asked, What are you doing?Clearly irritated, the first man responded, What the heck do you think I'm doing? I'm laying these darn bricks!He then walked over to the second bricklayer and asked the same question.The second fellow responded, Oh, I'm making a living.He approached the third bricklayer with the same question, What are you doing?The third looked up, smiled and said, I'm building a cathedral.At the end of the day, who feels better about how he's spent his last eight hours?

Every thought, action, decision or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, interbalancing, ever-moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time. This realization can be intimidating when it first dawns on us, but it becomes a springboard for rapid evolution.

David R. Hawkins

Self-righteousness is much like a spiritual egocentricity. It constitutes a secular type of love that thrives under conditionality, one in which is only existent after an individual meets the adopted standards of the condemner; oppositely, unconditional love is a holy love.

Criss Jami

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Plato

If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows.

Richard Brautigan

It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.

William Shakespeare

I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth.I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less deterministic.

Christopher Hitchens

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used to tell at all.

Umberto Eco

Today there are people trying to take away rights that our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for: our right to vote, our right to choose, affordable quality education, equal pay, access to health care. We the people can't let that happen.

Kerry Washington

People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.

George McGovern

There is nothing wrong with your marriage if you're dealing with bills and kids and the broken garbage disposal and in-laws and work demands. That's a normal marriage.

Phil McGraw

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.

JeanPaul Sartre

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

John Updike, (on being an old wr