Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!Thou art the Potter and I am the clay.

The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

Mark Twain

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Joan Didion

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.

George Bernard Shaw

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the communion with superior minds. In the best books, authors talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.

William Ellery Channing

The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians, knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different.

Jonathan Sacks

Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem so.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

How do you know so much about everything? was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant.

John Abbott

His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.

Graham Greene

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Paulo Coelho

If in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be 'devout' and to perform my 'religious duties', then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely 'proper', but loveless.

Pope Benedict XVI

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

George Orwell

All doors open to courtesy.

Thomas Fuller