If you think only of yourself, if you forget the rights and well-being of others, or, worse still, if you exploit others, ultimately you will lose. You will have no friends who will show concern for your well-being. Moreover, if a tragedy befalls you, instead of feeling concerned, others might even secretly rejoice. By contrast, if an individual is compassionate and altruistic, and has the interests of others in mind, then irrespective of whether that person knows a lot of people, wherever that person moves, he or she will immediately make friends. And when that person faces a tragedy, there will be plenty of people who will come to help.

Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.

Dennis Prager

Young people soon give, and forget insults, but old age is slow in both.

Joseph Addison

I join you, therefore, in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a Protestant Popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character

Thomas Jefferson

What I've learned about marriage: You need to have each other's back you have to be a kind of team going through life.

Tom Petty

In ourselves are triumph and defeat.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Rhetoric paints with a broad brush.

George Carlin

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

John Updike

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Edward Abbey

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Himmlisch ist's wenn ich bezwungen Meine irdische Begier; Aber doch wenn's nich gelungen Hatt' ich auch recht huebsch Plaisir!Loosely translated:It is heavenly, when I overcomeMy earthly desiresBut nevertheless, when I'm not successful,It can also be quite pleasurable.

Leo Tolstoy

Nothing is ever certain.

Alice Sebold

Bad humor is an evasion of reality good humor is an acceptance of it.

Malcolm Muggeridge