The study of law is valuable as a mental discipline, but the practice of pleading tends to make one petty, formal, and insincere. To be driven to look to legality rather than to equity blurs the view of truth and justice.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Franz Kafka

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

Edith Wharton

If you tell God no because He won't explain the reason He wants you to do something, you are actually hindering His blessing. But when you say yes to Him, all of heaven opens to pour out His goodness and reward your obedience. What matters more than material blessings are the things He is teaching us in our spirit.

Charles Stanley

...I live in Ireland every day in a drizzly dream of a Dublin walk...

John Geddes

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Don DeLillo

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promi

On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Thomas Jefferson

We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

All earthly delights are sweeter in expectation than in enjoyment; but all spiritual pleasures more in fruition than in expectation.

Francois Fenelon

I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.

Laura Riding

Massachusetts children cannot only lead the nation in test scores, they can be competitive with the best in the world. And the gap in achievement among races can virtually disappear.

Mitt Romney

Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each one.

Barbra Streisand