An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

Samuel Johnson

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga -- stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

Edward Hoagland

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

Walt Whitman

It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.

Mark Twain

True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks.

St. Jerome

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.

Jim Harrison

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

Bertrand Russell

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Isaac Asimov

The professors laugh at themselves, they laugh at life; they long ago abjured the bitch-goddess Success, and the best of them will fight for his scholastic ideals with a courage and persistence that would shame a soldier. The professor is not afraid of words like truth; in fact he is not afraid of words at all.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

The slave has but one master, the ambitious man has as many as there are persons whose aid may contribute to the advancement of his fortunes.

Jean de la Bruyere

Take a leap of faith and begin this wondrous new year by believing. Believe in yourself. And believe that there is a loving Source - a Sower of Dreams - just waiting to be asked to help you make your dreams come true.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Mignon McLaughlin