How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.

Peter Ackroyd

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

Gore Vidal

While man's desires and aspirations stir he cannot choose but err.

Johann von Goethe

It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.

Charles Dickens

If God has created the world, his primary worry was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us

Albert Einstein

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

John Updike

Each thought was epic yet minuscule.

Aleatha Romig

If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer

Steven Wright

Bring the past, but only if you can build from it.

Dominico Scarlatti

If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself...that a tiger is an optical illusion--well, he will find out he is wrong. The tiger will himself intervene in the discussion, in a manner which will be in every sense conclusive.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

Every moment of resistance to temptation is a victory.

Frederick W. Faber

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

Samuel Butler