Yo no nací dichoso. De niño, mi himno favorito era: «Cansado del mundo y con el peso de mis pecados». A los cinco años yo pensaba que si había de vivir setenta no había pasado aún más que la catorceava parte de mi vida vital, y me parecía casi insoportable la enorme cantidad de aburrimiento que me aguardaba. En la adolescencia la vida me era odiosa, y estaba continuamente al borde del suicidio, del cual me libré gracias al deseo de saber más matemáticas. Hoy, por el contrario, gusto de la vida, y casi estoy por decir que cada año que pasa la encuentro más gustosa. Esto es debido, en parte, a haber descubierto cuáles eran las cosas que deseaba más y haber adquirido gradualmente muchas de ellas. En parte es debido también a haberme desprendido, felizmente, de ciertos deseos (la adquisición del conocimiento indudable acerca de algo) como esencialmente inasequibles. Pero en la mayor parte se debe a la preocupación, cada día menor, de mí mismo.

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

What is done to children, they will do to society.

Karl Menninger

I concentrate on exercises from the waist down, since that is the laziest part of a woman's body.

Tina Louise

Try and trust will move mountains.

Proverb

The true value of man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectability is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

I think I am really irreverent and I pretty much just talk to and about men the way men talk to and about women.

Kesha

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Plato

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Henry David Thoreau

Throughout history, great leaders have known the power of humor.

Allen Klein

I hate funerals and would not attend my own if it could be avoided, but it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.

Robert T. Morris

Even when there are times that we're not happy, happiness will creep in.

Dyan Cannon

Enthusiasm. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.

Ambrose Bierce