Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

George Eliot

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

John le Carre

I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Johnson, who defines as 'metrical composition', defines as 'An inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems; one who writes in measure'. We can gauge how far we have traveled by comparing this with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary which, after a definition very like Johnson's, feels obligated to add 'A writer in verse (or sometimes in elevated prose) distinguished by imaginative power, insight, sensibility, and faculty of expression'.

C.S. Lewis

Always you have to contend with the stupidity of men.

Henry David Thoreau

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.

Les Paul

Enjoy your happiness while you have it, and while, you have it do not too closely scrutinize its foundation.

Joseph Farrell

It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.

Georges Bernanos

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

Ayn Rand

When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven't developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don't know how to eliminate them effectively.

W. Clement Stone

There are no endings, only beginnings that have been reborn.

D. Byron Patterson

On the one hand, the financial projection is on the agenda - we will see if this problem can be resolved or not. I think it is a right idea to stage a special summit, which would deal with the question of priorities of European politics.

Angela Merkel