A true personality . . . is like a robust organism that, with unconscious sureness, seeks out and digests the nourishment appropriate to it and vigorously rejects that which is unsuitable.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

John Ruskin

The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh, the brave Music of a distant drum!

Omar Khayyam

You've got to step up, Emme. They need to hear your voice, hear you. You're better than being stuck in the background.

Elizabeth Eulberg

You cannot expect to achieve new goals or move beyond your present circumstances unless you change.

Les Brown

Death doesn't frighten me now I can think peacefully of ending a long life.

Jeanne Calment

[S]he stood for some moments gazing at the sisters, with affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.

Charles Dickens

The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.

George Sand

I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

William Gilmore Simms

Olympic Gold changed me and my life dramatically. I became a celebrity overnight and people see me as a famous skater, not a real person.

Oksana Baiul

His vocation was orderliness, which is the basis of creation. Accordingly, when a letter came, he would turn it over in his hands for a long time, gazing at it meditatively; then he would put it away in a file without opening it, because everything had its own time.

Salvatore Satta

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Ulysses Simpson Grant