I think one of the basic tasks in life - one of the nice things we can do for each other - is to take things that are horrible and scary and make them acceptable and less frightening and, if possible, funny. It feels great to succeed at that.

To die, to sleep --To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub,For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause; there's the respectThat makes calamity of so long life.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Samuel Johnson

It is harder for a poor man to be successful than it is for a rich man.

Gregory Nunn

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

Elton John

You will find peace not by trying to escape your problems, but by confronting them courageously. You will find peace not in denial, but in victory.

J. Donald Walters

Some who will not speak against another, in the end does them harm.

Proverb

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

Socrates

I would awake at sunrise, and without washing or dressing sit down before the easel which stood right beside my bed. Thus the first image I saw on awakening was the painting I had begun, as it was the last I saw in the evening when I retired . . . I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to 'see', like a medium (very much so indeed), the images that would spring up in my imagination. Often I saw these images exactly situated in the painting. Then, at the point commanded by them, I would paint, paint with the hot taste in my mouth that panting hunting dogs must have at the moment when they fasten their teeth into the game killed that very instant by a well-aimed shot. At times I would wait whole hours without any such images occuring. Then, not painting, I would remain in suspense, holding up one paw, from which the brush hung motionless, ready to pounce again upon the oneiric landscape of my canvas the moment the next explosion of my brain brought a new victim of my imagination bleeding to the ground.

Salvador Dali, My Secret Life

Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically , she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A. Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness...

Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Imag

Business is more exciting than any game.

Lord Beaverbrook

The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman