A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?For our freedom, said Davin.No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first.They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me.Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant...When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Not in achievement, but in endurance, of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

H. L. Mencken

Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?

Jonathan Sacks

I've always had God, but now I want to go back to church for the sense of community and that feeling of positive thinking, a place where I can think about being a better person.

Julianne Hough

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

Solomon

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

Elizabeth Kostova

I want to be around for a long time, singing and making albums and movies.

Jennifer Hudson

..It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

Neil Gaiman

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

Lev Grossman

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light every eye, looking on, finds its own.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

If Germany is to become a colonizing power, all I say is, God speed her! She becomes our ally and partner in the execution of the great purposes of Providence for the advantage of mankind.

William Ewart Gladstone

Genius must be born, and never can be taught.

John Dryden