Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

If you act for self-gain then no good can come of it. If you act selflessly, then you act well for all and you must not be afraid.

Rand Miller

We connect through our dreams. Like we could be a thousand miles apart and I'd still know you were there.

Pete Hautman

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most people I know are not hard-core religious people. They are what I would call 'lightly religious.' So I don't buy the notion that we can't laugh about religion in America.

Trey Parker

Being the son of a filmmaker, you are aware of a career as a director. You don't think of it as just movies, but as a life.

Jason Reitman

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground; one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.

Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit

'Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.

Charles Lamb

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

G. K. Chesterton

A funeral is a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker.

Ambrose Bierce

I know now what this meant, that the bison were the gift of a good spirit and were our strength, but we should lose them, and from the same good spirit we must find another strength.

Black Elk