The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Like a celestial chaperon, the placebo leads us through the uncharted passageways of mind and gives us a greater sense of infinity than if we were to spend all our days with our eyes hypnotically glued to the giant telescope at Mt. Palomar. What we see ultimately is that the placebo isn't really necessary and that the mind can carry out its difficult and wondrous missions unprompted by little pills. The placebo is only a tangible object made essential in an age that feels uncomfortable with intangibles, an age that prefers to think that every inner effect must have an outer cause. Since it has size and shape and can be hand-held, the placebo satisfies the contemporary craving for visible mechanisms and visible answers . The placebo, then, is an emissary between the will to live and the body.

Norman Cousins

He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body.

Virginia Woolf

People seek within a short span of life to satisfy a thousand desires, each of which is insatiable.

Oliver Goldsmith

I cannot help but think a curious event is this life of mine.

John James Audubon

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

Henry James

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, (wide

I look forward to a time, in the not so distant future, when we no longer look forward to 'firsts' as milestones women have yet to achieve, but we look back on them as historic events that continue to teach and inspire.

Dee Dee Myers

I remember once giving my dad some drawings and writings and said, 'If you could just give these to the publisher, that would be great.' And I was about five!

Sally Hawkins

Today, in twelve countries, young men are resisting conscription and refusing military service. They are the pioneers of a warless world.

Albert Einstein

I think that's become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family - a statement - and you can afford it, then that's a noble project.

Sylvester Stallone

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

William Blake

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way. You become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

Aristotle