Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself And falls on the other side

The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.

Wendell Phillips

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

Tom Perrotta

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Georges Bataille

To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.

Henry James

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

Thomas Nagel

Charity begins at home, but should not end there.

Thomas Fuller

They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.

Stephen King

I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.

Henry J. Kaiser

What a man thinks of himself that is what determines, or rather indicates his fate.

Henry David Thoreau

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

Larry Page

Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open.

Lord Thomas Dewar

I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature how words alone can get your heart doing that.

Laura Marling