Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Dont be content with things as they are. Dont take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.

Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole.

J.K. Rowling

Man is manacled only by himself; thought and action are the jailers of Fate.

James Allen

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

.. art and life are no longer separate domains....The word 'art' no longer has anything to say to us. In place of that, we (= De Stijl) insist upon the construction of our surroundings according to creative laws, deriving from a fixed principle.

Theo van Doesburg

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

William Shakespeare

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann

To the query, What is a friend? his reply was A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

Aristotle

I was really fortunate growing up to have a broad musical education. My parents listened to all kinds of music, rock, soul, Motown, jazz, Frank Sinatra, everything.

Mayer Hawthorne

Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?

Emma Goldman

One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error.

Edward George BulwerLytton

I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home, it starts with the parental influence.

Julius Erving

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Cyril Connolly