I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can't find.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Hypatia

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Mark Twain

The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.

Alan Price

You can't remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.

Terry Pratchett

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

Ambrose Bierce

No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

Bertolt Brecht

One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But speaking for myself, I can honestly say this is not so... I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

Thomas Alva Edison

We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.

Alexander McCall Smith

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

The work of art is a scream of freedom.

Christo

The tiny madman in his padded cell.

Vladimir Nabokov