To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world - that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Put a knife to thy throat, if you're a man given to appetite.

Bible

It's true, there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why, I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid, if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat.

Norah Jones

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

Samuel Johnson

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long, underestimate the risks, want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them, and they end up spending more money, causing much more damage to the economy.

Timothy Geithner

They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

James Stockdale

I used to say: there is a God-shaped hole in me. For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

Salman Rushdie

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

Samuel Beckett

Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowdAs herds of bellowing buses drive byLove's anguish tightens your throatAs if you were never to be loved againIf you lived in the old days you would enter a monasteryYou are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayerYou make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter cracklesThe sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your lifeIt's a painting hanging in a dark museumAnd sometimes you go and look at it close up

Guillaume Apollinaire

All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor our precious stones, is nothing else but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of its own nature.

William Law

No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.

John Calvin

If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I will never be tricked into it.

Jane Austen