Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.

We [Americans] are the lavishest and showiest and most luxury-loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.

Mark Twain

Nobility doesn't lie in surpassing the other man, but in surpassing the previous self.

Hindu Spiritual

It’s just that…I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It’s the universe’s way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It’s how life is.

Sarah Dessen

An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper.

Kahlil Gibran

However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!

Friedrich Nietzsche

The significance of life is living.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.

Aristotle

Be larger than your task.

Orison Swett Marden

In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

Graham Swift

You're a dream. Like everything else.

Kelly Creagh

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.

Omar N. Bradley