The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

I love to lose myself in a mystery to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.

Thomas Browne

I try to offset any tendency towards the macabre with humour. As I see it, this is a typically English form of humour. It's a piece with such jokes as the one about the man who was being led to the gallows to be hanged. He looked at the trap door in the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, 'I say, is that thing safe?'

Alfred Hitchcock

We live in a world where sports have the potential to bridge the gap between racism, sexism and discrimination. The 2012 Olympic Games was a great start but hopefully what these games taught us is that if women are given an opportunity on an equal playing field the possibilities for women are endless.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee

My attitude is never to be satisfied, never enough, never.

Duke Ellington

Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary much. Beauty if vapour from the pit of death.

J. A. Baker

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Benjamin Disraeli

You become what you think about.

Earl Nightingale

It's amazing when you're playing to a crowd who barely understands English but they're singing parts of your song back to you.

Jason Derulo

I was not born in a home where there were stereotypes. So that was very useful because it gave me the sense of possibilities, of flying, if I may say, of making my hopes and dreams a reality.

Michelle Bachelet

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

William James

My mother's only wish was to start a life in America because America was the cradle of every promise and opportunity.

Masiela Lusha

All objects lose by too familiar a view.

John Dryden