It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they speak with the accent of natives they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

Soren Kierkegaard

If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.

Terry Pratchett

All real education is the architecture of the soul.

William Bennett

Epictetus goes much further when he asks: Why do we not lose our temper if someone tells us that we have a headache, while we do lose it if someone says there is anything wrong with our arguments or our choice?

Blaise Pascal

Nothing except possibly love and death are of importance

Gerald Durrell

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

Alberto Giacometti

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Better to be safe than sorry.

Proverb

The State, that craving rookery of committees and subcommittees.

V. S. Pritchett

I like business and personal life to be distinct.

Carter Burwell

The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that's real most of that whiny stuff isn't real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death.

Jonathan Davis