In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

I awoke with devout thanksgiving for my friends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.

Jack Kerouac

....Then he felt quite ashamed, and hid his head under his wing; for he did not know what to do, he was so happy, and yet not at all proud. He had been persecuted and despised for his ugliness, and now he heard them say he was the most beautiful of all the birds. Even the elder-tree bent down its bows into the water before him, and the sun shone warm and bright. He would never became vain or conceited, and would always remembered how it felt to be despised and teased, and he was very sorry for all the creatures who are so treated merely because they are different from those around them. Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart,

Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugl

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

Ask those who love Him with a sincere love, and they will tell you that they find no greater or prompter relief amid the troubles of their life than in loving conversation with their Divine Friend.

Alphonsus Liguori

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

Mies Van der Rohe

Beautiful things like beautiful sins belong to the rich

Oscar Wilde

Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do -- you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.

Jodi Picoult

Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.

Charles Dickens

No one can really honestly be the very best, no one.

John Wooden

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Renown? I've already got more of it than those I respect, and will never have as much as those for whom I feel contempt...

Jean Rostand