I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

I had a go at changing history - maybe not all by myself - I fought at the battle of Normandy, I slogged through the Ardennes, and I celebrated the liberation of Paris on the streets with beautiful French girls throwing flowers at me. I said good-bye to my first true love and discovered what I really wanted to do with my life.

LeRoy Neiman

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

William Butler Yeats

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

George Orwell

Reason and love are sworn enemies.

Pierre Corneille

Gossip is the art of saying nothing in a way that leaves practically nothing unsaid.

Walter Winchell

Study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

Thomas Moore

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

Benjamin Franklin

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.

Octavio Paz

I love my children beyond all reason. They're my joy, even when they're wild with kid energy.

Christopher Meloni

It mocks me as it flies, I know: All too soon the gleam will go; Yet I love it and shall love My dream that brooks no narrower bars Than bind the darkening heavens above, My Jack o'Lanthorn of the stars: Then, I'll follow it no more, I'll light the lamp: I'll close the door.

Alfred Noyes

...[F]ireworks had for her a direct and magical appeal. Their attraction was more complex than that of any other form of art. They had pattern and sequence, colour and sound, brilliance and mobility; they had suspense, surprise, and a faint hint of danger; above all, they had the supreme quality of transience, which puts the keenest edge on beauty and makes it touch some spring in the heart which more enduring excellences cannot reach.

Jan Struther