If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

Nhat Hanh

My mom was truly an iconic figure, a great journalist and a pioneering woman who died at 54 of cancer without ever having revealed to viewers that she was ill.

David Frum

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?

Jane Austen

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys' philosophies--these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.

C.S. Lewis

Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass, the mere materials with which wisdom builds, till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place, does but encumber whom it seems to enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

William Cowper

Music is the space between the notes.

Claude Debussy

She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

Virginia Woolf

The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still.

Alexander Pope

What was the point in crying when there was no one to comfort you? And what was worse, when you couldn't even comfort yourself?

Cassandra Clare

To show pity is felt as a sign of contempt because one has clearly ceased to be an object of fear as soon as one is pitied.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Finality is not the language of politics.

Benjamin Disraeli

She hated that will had this effect on her. Hated it. She knew better. She knew what he thought of her. That she was worth nothing. And still a look from him could make her tremble with mingled hatred and longing. It was like poison in her blood, to which Jem was the only antidote.

Cassandra Clare