We tend to get what we expect.

Show us a man who never makes a mistake and we will show you a man who never makes anything. The capacity for occasional blundering is inseparable from the capacity to bring things to pass. The only men who are past the danger of making mistakes are the men who sleep at Greenwood.

H. L. Wayland

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Car

The freedom to make a fortune on the stock exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.

Sir John Mortimer

You know my name, not my story. You've heard what I've done, but not what I've been through.

Jonathan Anthony Burkett

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. It's only the middle-aged who are really conscious of their limitations--that is why one should be so patient with them.

Saki [Hector Hugh Munro]

Where do you come up with these zingers, Clint? Do you own some kind of joke factory in Indonesia where you've got eight-year-olds working ninety hours a week to deliver you that kind of top-quality witticism? There are boy bands with more original material.

John Green

I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream, hope any hope, go anywhere I pleased any time I pleased, fight any foe, win or lose, live or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place.

Donald Davis

If you have only one passion in life - football - and you pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, it becomes very dangerous. When you stop doing this activity it is as though you are dying. The death of that activity is a death in itself.

Eric Cantona

Analysis and synthesis ordinarily clarify matters for us about as much as taking a Swiss watch apart and dumping its wheels, springs, hands, threads, pivots, screws and gears into a layman's hands for reassembling, clarifies a watch to a layman.

Source Unknown

He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.

Leo Tolstoy

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.

John Green

I don't remember, I didn't do it. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it

Joe Simmons