I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

For neither birth, nor wealth, nor honors, can awaken in the minds of men the principles which should guide those who from their youth aspire to an honorable and excellent life, as Love awakens them

Plato

To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

George Wald

Strong characters are brought out by change of situation, and gentle ones by permanence.

Jean Paul Richter

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

Voltaire

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

Herman Melville

I'm one of those people who thinks that changing one's hair is the only part of the body that you can change at will.

Hillary Clinton

Conversation is three women stand on the corner talking. Gossip is when one of them leaves.

Herb Shriner

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

Muriel Spark

I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?

William Shakespeare

The biggest surprise, which is also the best, is that I didn't know I would love motherhood as much as I do.

Deborah Norville

I've developed into quite a swan. I'm one of those people that will probably look better and better as I get older until I drop dead of beauty.

Rufus Wainwright

Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

John Green