This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter.

I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.

Tom Lehrer

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Aristotle

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All lovers live by longing, and endure; summon a vision and declare it pure

Theodore Roethke

Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.

Daisaku Ikeda

I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.

John Steinbeck

Avarice, the spur of industry.

David Hume

When war is declared, truth is the first casualty.

Arthur Ponsonby

He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected.

Samuel Johnson

The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play is; at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end for ever.

Blaise Pascal

But some part of him realized, even as he fought to break free from Lupin, that Sirius had never kept him waiting before. . . . Sirius had risked everything, always, to see Harry, to help him. . . . If Sirius was not reappearing out of that archway when Harry was yelling for him as though his life depended on it, the only possible explanation was that he could not come back. . . . That he really was . . .

J.K. Rowling

I'm still going to do television. I'm just not going to do morning television. I would like to do some things that satisfy interests, private interests.

Bryant Gumbel