Thought expands, but paralyzes; action animates, but narrows.

That prayer has great power which a person makes with all his might. It makes a sour heart sweet, a sad heart merry, a poor heart rich, a foolish heart wise, a timid heart brave, a sick heart well, a blind heart full of sight, a cold heart ardent. It draws down the great God into the little heart; it drives the hungry soul up into the fullness of God; it brings together two lovers, God and the soul, in a wondrous place where they speak much of love.

Mechthild of Magheburg

The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, c

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Mario Vargas Llosa

The worst thing that can happen in a democracy - as well as in an individual's life - is to become cynical about the future and lose hope.

Hillary Clinton

He's got the whole world at his feet and he can't find his shoes.

John Williamson

Excessive reservations and paralyzing despondency have not helped the sciences to advance nor are they helping them to advance, but a healthy optimism that cheerfully searches for new ways to understand, as it is convinced that it will be possible to find them.

Alois Alzheimer, Alzheimer

If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.

Glen Hansard

That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.

C.S. Lewis

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.

William Gibson

I didn't know my Dad - he moved out early. And my mom's politics were kind of hardscrabble. She didn't think about Democrats or Republicans. She thought about who made sense. I've been both in my life.

Dennis Miller

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

Henry David Thoreau