The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

Dale Carnegie

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

Henry David Thoreau

You do have to do business with and to try to influence people you don't agree with, or find disagreeable, so it's important to stress that balance.

William Hague

I love to cook. I spend weekends reading cookbooks-it's really my relaxation.

Ali Larter

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Thomas Mann

The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.

Epictetus

In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer - the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.

A. J. P. Taylor

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one's aim.

John D. Rockefeller

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Gaston Bachelard

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.

Richard Bach