Words form the sinew and muscle that hold societies upright, he argued. Consider the Koran, the Bible, the American Constitution, but also letters from fathers to sons, last wills, blessings, curses. Thousands upon thousands of words infused with the full spectrum of emotions fill in the nooks and corners of human life.

Such a number of nights,' said the girl, with a touch of woman's tenderness, which communicated something like sweetness of tone, even to her voice; 'such a number of nights as I've been patient with you, nursing and caring for you, as if you had been a child: and this the first that I've seen you like yourself; you wouldn't have served me as you did just now, if you'd thought of that, would you? Come, come; say you wouldn't.

Charles Dickens

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

George Eliot

I have lived, and I have run the course which fortune allotted me; and now my shade shall descend illustrious to the grave.

Virgil

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

William Butler Yeats

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never accept a drink from a Urologist.

Erma Bombeck

The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

Oscar Wilde

We need cancer because, by the very fact of its insurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer.

Gilbert Adair

The means to gain happiness is to throw out from oneself like a spider in all directions an adhesive web of love, and to catch in it all that comes

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Spontaneous combustion of grassroots politics is the future.

Dick Morris

Better a friendly refusal than an unwilling consent.

Proverb

Just because I've walked into this crazy fantasy doesn't mean I can just abandon my other plans, much as I might want to.

Alexandra Adornetto