As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round.

War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect. We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of the sheltered life. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the specters of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword.

Sir Edmund Gosse

Those who have the ability to be grateful are the ones who have the ability to achieve greatness.

Steve Maraboli

The helicopter is a fine way to travel, but it induces a view of the world that only God and CEOs share on a regular basis.

Morley Safer

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

Boris Pasternak

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

Joni Mitchell

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.

Mario Batali

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news.

James Reston

Things don't stay the way they are, said Finnerty. It's too entertaining to try to change them.

Kurt Vonnegut

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

John Ruskin

There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.

Flannery O'Connor

Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Kurt Vonnegut