The system of book-keeping by double entry is, perhaps, the most beautiful one in the wide domain of literature or science. Were it less common, it would be the admiration of the learned world.

What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

Hu Shih

One comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony.

George Mallory

However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Henry David Thoreau

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

Lawrence Durrell

Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.

Victor Hugo

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

Lev Grossman

It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.

Tony Blair

Macbeth:If we should fail?Lady Macbeth:We fail?But screw your courage to the sticking place,And we'll not fail.

William Shakespeare

I surround myself with good people who make me feel great and give me positive energy.

Ali Krieger

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

Leo Tolstoy

My mother was the sweetest lady who ever lived on this planet, but if you tried to tell her that Jesus wasn't a Christian, she would stomp you to death.

Dick Gregory