Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

Herbert Croly

I was a very undisciplined person but acting was something that actually motivated me to get up in the morning. I hadn't experienced that before, but it was something that really excited me. I think I could be quite self-conscious and it gave me a release.

Rufus Sewell

When planning your wedding you make so many decisions: 'Do I want this fork or that fork?' But in the end people aren't going to remember what napkin holder you choose.

Lara Stone

Work harder on yourself than you do on your job.

Jim Rohn

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community... that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same.

John Quincy Adams

You can't know, you can only believe - or not.

C.S. Lewis

Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations.

Jean Paul Richter

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

Plato

I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.

J. K. Rowling

No, actually 'The Host' was totally a palate-cleanser for me. I wanted to do something a little bit different than romantic love. Romantic love is in there, obviously, because I enjoy writing about that and living it a lot.

Stephenie Meyer

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.

William Osler