I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

one pain is cured by another. catch some new infection in your eye and the poison of the old one would die.

William Shakespeare

Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.

Werner Heisenberg

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Jeanette Winterson

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

Henry David Thoreau

The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.

Thomas Campbell

Recommend virtue to your children it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

Ludwig van Beethoven

You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left, or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of 'getting along.'

John Shelby Spong

In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.

Alan Wilson Watts

An intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

Samuel Johnson

A theoretical grounding in agronomy must, therefore, include knowledge of biological laws.

Trofim Lysenko

I was worried about my mom more than I was worried about the president. And then I was worried about the president, and then I was worried about myself.

Monica Lewinsky

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

George Eliot