If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

Lord, where we are wrong, make us willing to change where we are right, make us easy to live with.

Peter Marshall

Dear Madam,I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom. Yours, very sincerely and respectfully.

Abraham Lincoln

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength -- each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second S

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

Lillian Hellman

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

Tom Stoppard

I think architecture has to be a gift.

Jean Nouvel

According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.

Barry Sanders, A is for Ox, 1994

A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.

Jeremy Taylor

Mile by mile, it's a trial; yard by yard, it's hard; but inch by inch, it's a cinch.

Gabrielle Giffords

When you're in a relationship with somebody who is also a public personality, then it doubles the attention from the media.

Michelle Williams

I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.

William Tecumseh Sherman