When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

Some say it will bring war to the heavens, but its purpose is to deter war, in the heavens and on earth.

Ronald Reagan

There is no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient novelty is forever renewed. We realize the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of Heraclitus, the Ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like measure extinguished. That translucent and mysterious Flame shines undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always miraculously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of fire. The world is moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them! Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresaw--to say nothing of older and vaster events--the Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has always been burning at! The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which aspect you prefer. You will always be right.

Havelock Ellis, Impressions and

She was so fat that she has a dress with a sign on the back that says caution wide load

Rodney Dangerfield

Having a baby changes the way you view your in-laws. I love it when they come to visit now. They can hold the baby and I can go out.

Matthew Broderick

Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Johannes Kepler

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.

Oscar Wilde, from Intentions

The corporate woman has been defined as the 'liberated woman' and I see that as the exact opposite. I think she now is more enslaved, maybe even more than the housewife was because she's so out of her power, and imitating male power is not female power.

Kenny Loggins

Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need

Voltaire

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

W. Somerset Maugham

May God be with me! May Heaven bless this New Year. May it be a year of fruitfulness, of peace and prosperity; may it be a year of peace and unity for all mankind; may the world be freed of cholera.

Giacomo Meyerbeer

Ethnic prejudice has no place in sports, and baseball must recognize that truth if it is to maintain stature as a national game.

Branch Rickey

Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

Karl Popper