Quotes

"All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself." ~Ralph Ellison
"We are not meant to find peace in this world. The spirit of life cannot exist without effort. Destroy the rivalries of man and nations and you will have destroyed all that makes for betterment and progress on Earth." ~Winston Churchill
"Literature the Americans have none...In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" ~Sydney Smith
"We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe...The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself...We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is blackness in Hawthorne that...fixes and fascinates me." ~Herman Melville
"Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'" ~Herman Melville
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil." ~Walt Whitman
"I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"...in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance." ~Herman Melville
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." ~Henry David Thoreau
"If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession. If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevaces toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. Seek out the sunshine. It is a simple prescription. Avoid the darkness. It is a simple prescription, but you will not follow it. You will turn immediately to the darkness. You will be drawn to it by the cords of fear and of longing. You will imagine that you are tired of the sunlight; the waters that unnerve you will tug in the ancient recesses of your mind; the midnight will seem restful-you will end by going down." ~Loren Eiseley
"If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles." ~Walt Whitman
"Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things." ~Will Cather
"Make it new! Art is a joyous thing." ~Ezra Pound
"Theater is one of the most emotionally satisfying experiences imaginable. It touches our inner core, and gives insight into who we are." ~Theodore Man
"General improvisations often give actors an insight beyond their words by helping them to 'see the word' and achieve a reality for the scene." ~Viola Spolin
"My technique is the outcome of thinking for myself, of my own logic and approach; it is not borrowed from what others are doing." ~Charlie Chaplin
"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of our own experience." ~Paul Newman
"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out." ~Alfred Hitchcock
"The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel." ~Horace Walpole
"All the world's a stage and all the men and women werely players." ~William Shakespeare
"A good audition is one in which the performer...reveals who and what he is as a human being while at the same time giving the auditors an idea of the extent of his talents." ~Fred Silver
"Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about." ~Stephen Sondheim
"The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history." ~George Santalana
"The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities." ~Daniel Day Lewis
"Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he expresses himself." ~Jeanna Moreau
"The object of war is victory, the object of victory is conquest, and the object of conquest is occupation." ~Napoléon Bonaparte
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." ~Willa Cather
"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." ~Mark Twain
"Where there is great love, there are always miracles." ~Willa Cather
"I been wanderin' early and late, New York City to the Golden Gate, an' it looks like I'm never gonna cease my wanderin'." ~American Folk Song
"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck." ~Annie Dillard
"If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life." ~Anna Quindlen
"Something in me strives to connect with the past. Not my past, but another's past. An ancestral past. And so, after all, it is my past." ~Karen Cooper
"My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'" ~Pete Hamill
"Now you take 'Bambi' or 'Snow White' - That's scary!" ~Stephen King
"A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness." ~Robert Frost
"Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know...if one is honest." ~May Sarton
"Poetry is a conversation with the world; poetry is a conversaton with the words on the page in which you allow those words to speak back to you; and poetry is a conversation with yourself. Many times I meet students and see a little look of weariness in their faces-'I'm not sure if I want to do this'-I like to say, 'Wait a minute. How nervous are you about the conversation you're going to have at lunch today with your friends?' And they say, 'Oh, we're not nervous at all about that. We do that everyday.' Then I tell them they can come to feel the same way about writing. Writing doesn't have to be an exotic or stressful experience. You can just sit down with a piece of paper and begin talking and see what speaks back." ~Naomi Shihab Nye
"All you need is love." ~The Beatles
"What's love got to do with it?" ~Tina Turner
"Dreams are necessary to life." ~Anaïs Nin
"Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy." ~W.H.Auden
"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." ~Elie Wiesel
"Something deathless and dangerous in the world sweeps past you...It is something fearful and ominous, something turbulent and to be dreaded, which distends the drama to include the life of nations as well as of men. It is an ageless warning..." ~John Mason Brown
"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world..." ~John Winthrop
"Goodbye, if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think it a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs." ~Ambrose Bierce
"I don't doubt that every prince would like to be both; but since it is hard to accomodate these qualities, if you have to make a choice, to be feared is much safer than to be loved. For it is a good general rule about men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, fearful of danger and greedy for gain....[love] is a link of obligation which men, because they are rotten, will break anything they think doing so serves their advantage; but fear involves dread of punishment, from which they can never escape." ~Machiavelli
"Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise through civility, courage, compassion and character." ~George W. Bush
"I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again." ~William Penn
"Wherever there is a humn being there is an opportunity for kindness." ~Seneca
"He that has done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obligated." ~Benjamin Franklin
"The mind is no match with the heart in persuasion; constitutionality is no match with compassion." ~Everett M. Dirksen
"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another." ~Thomas Merton
"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these." ~George Washington Carver
"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see." ~Mark Twain
"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas." ~Linus Pauling
"Men learn while they teach." ~Seneca
"If you can't return a favor, pass it on." ~Louise Brown
"Few minds wear out, more rust out." ~Christian Nestell Bovee
"A friend's eye is a good mirror." ~Irish proverb
"We will either find a way, or make one." ~Hannibal
"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel." ~Carl W. Buechner
"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not." ~George Bernard Shaw
"Interest and attention will insure to you an education." ~Robert A. Millikan
"We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails." ~Anonymous
"Begin somewhere; you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do." ~Liz Smith
"If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake." ~F. Wikzek
"The expert at anything was once a beginner." ~Hayes
"The most beautiful discovery true friends can make is that they can grow seperately without growing apart." ~Elisabeth Foley
"You can't have everything...where would you put it?" ~Steven Wright
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until..we have stopped saying 'It got lost.' and say 'I lost it.'" ~Sidney J. Harris
"Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light." ~Jennie Jerome Churchill
"Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it." ~Henry Mintzberg
"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow." ~Chinese proverb
"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute." ~Gil Stern
"The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway." ~Henry Boye
"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present." ~Babatunde Olatanji
"I ask you not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders." ~Jewish proverb
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with that I can do." ~Edward Everett Hale
"Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it." ~George Eliot
"Courage is the power to let go of the familiar." ~Raymond Lindquist
"Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won't have time to make them all yourself." ~Alfred Sheinwold
"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today." ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"Genius without education is like silver in the mine." ~Benjamin Franklin
"With every civil right there has to be a corresponding civil obligation." ~Edison Haines
"Attitudes are contagious. Is yours worth catching?" ~Anonymous
"It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are." ~Roy Disney
"It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong." ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"'I must do something' always solves more problems than 'Something must be done.'" ~Anonymous
"The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk." ~Jacqueline Schiff
"It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something." ~Ornette Coleman
"You win some, you lose some, and some get rained out, but you have to suit up for them all." ~J. Askerberg
"The best way to predict the future is to create it." ~Peter Drucker
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." ~Winston Churchill
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they saught." ~Matsuo Baslay
"Progress always involves risks. You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first." ~Frederick B. Wilcox
"Push yourself again and again. Don't give an inch until the final buzzer sounds." ~Larry Bird
"The life which is unexamined is not worth living." ~Pluto
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." ~Walden
"This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me." ~Emily Dickinson
"We think of her hidden in a white dress among the folded lines and sachets of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight sending jellies and notes with no address to all the wondering Amberst neighbors. Eccentric as New England weather the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle, blew two half-imagined lovers off. Yet legend won't explain the sheer sanity of vision, the serious mischief of language, the economy of pain." ~Linda Pastan
"A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe, 'The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'" ~Stephen Crane
"I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away." ~Sherwood Anderson
"On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, or nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. By some change here they are, all on this Earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this Earth, lying, on quilts on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away." ~James Agee
"In a sense I went naked to Salem, still unable to accept the most common experience of humanity, the shifts of interests that turned loving husbands and wives into stony enemies, loving parents into indifferent supervisors or even exploiters of their children, and so forth. As I already knew from my reading, that was the real story of ancient Salem Village, what they called then the breaking of charity with one another. The gray rain on my windshield was falling into my soul." ~Arthur Miller
"The law must be stable, but it must not stand still." ~Roscoe Pound
"Liberty means responsiblity. That is why most men dread it." ~George Bernard Shaw
"The people's good is the highest law." ~Cicero
"Reason is the life of the law." ~Sir Edward Coke
"All religions, laws, morals and political systems are but necessary means to preserve social order." ~Chien Tuttsiu
"Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered." ~Aristotle
"Ours is a government of laws, not men." ~John Adams
"You are better off not knowing how laws and sausages are made." ~Anonymous
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." ~Margaret Mead
"A president only tells Congress what to do. Lobbyists tell 'em what they will do." ~Will Rogers
"The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have run out." ~Chinese Proverb
"Three features mark the Anglo-American system as different from all others. One is the extent to which our law is formed in litigation. Another feature is the way we conduct these cases: we pit antagonists against each other, to cast up from their struggles the material of decisions. A third- and largest in the public consciousness- is the trial by jury." ~Charles Rembar
"We have a jury system which is superior to any in the world. Its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read." ~Mark Twain
"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer." ~Robert Frost
"Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them has the nominal winner is often a real loser-in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker, the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will be business enough." ~Abraham Lincoln
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." ~William Shakespeare
"The ethical practices of lawyers are probably no worse than those of other professions. Lawyers bring some of the trouble on by claiming in a sanctimonious way that they are interested only in justice, not power or wealth. They also suffer guilt by association. Their clients are often people in trouble. Saints need no lawyers: gangsters do." ~Lawrence M. Friedman
"If you outsmart your lawyer, you've got the wrong lawyer." ~John T. Nolan
"The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty." ~George Bernard Shaw
"Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals." ~H. L. Mencken
"It takes a village to raise a child." ~African Proverb
"Criminal law has to do with relations between the misbehaving individual and his government...Criminal law establishes rules of conduct; their breach, if prosecuted and conviction follows, results in punishment." ~Lawrence M. Friedman
"The more laws, the more offenders." ~Anonymous
"For my part I think it a less evil that some criminal should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part." ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Unless this right to bail before trial is preserved, the presumption of innocence, secured only after centuries of struggle, would lose its meaning." ~Stack vs. Boyle
"It is insufficient to restrain the wicked by punishment unless you render them virtuous by corrective discipline." ~Inscription over the door of Hospice of San Michele in Rome
"My object all sublime I shall achieve in time-to make the punishment fit the crime." ~W. S. Gilbert
"Better build schoolrooms for the boy than prison cells for the man." ~Elizabeth Cook
"'Torts' more or less means 'wrongs'...One of my friends said that Torts is the course which proves that your mother was right." ~Scott Turow
"In all civil acts the law doth not so much regard the intent of the actor, as the loss and damage of the party suffering." ~Lambert vs. Bessey
"Creditors have better memories than debtors." ~Benjamin Franklin
"Whenever a political body passes legislation on behalf of the consumer, the consumer will wait longer and pay more for the same product or service." ~Richard W. Trace
"This Court repeatedly has recognized that the whole subject of the domestic relations of husband and wife belongs to the laws of the States and not to the laws of the United States." ~Justice Blackmun
"Marriage is the only union that cannot be organized. Both sides think they are management." ~William J. Abley
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." ~Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful." ~John Marshall Harlan
"If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter." ~Thomas Jefferson
"The makes of our Constitution...conferred, against the Government, the right to be let alone-the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." ~Olmstead vs. United States
"Generalizations about the "way women are" and estimates of what is appropriate for most women no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description." ~Justice Ruth Boder Ginsburg
"Without a job all there is to life is boredom and insecurity." ~John Lennon
"The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we don't understand." ~Frank Herbert
"There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment." ~Norman Vincent Peale
"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them." ~Isaac Asimov
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." ~Barbara Tuchman
"You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through." ~Rosalynn Carter
"Character- the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life- is the source from which self-respect springs." ~Joan Didion
"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing." ~Abraham Lincoln
"To insure good health; eat lightly, breathe deeply, live moderately, cultivate cheerfulness and maintain an interest in life." ~William Londen
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." ~Albert Einstein
"Each of us makes a difference. It is from numberless acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped." ~Robert F. Kennedy
"I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done." ~Henry Ford
"Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport." ~Robert Weider
"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers." ~José Narowsky
"Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery." ~Bertrand Russell
"Make a game of finding something positive in every situation. Ninety-five percent of your emotions are determined by how you interpret events to yourself." ~Brian Tracey
"What's meant to be will always find a way." ~Anonymous
"Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons." ~Picasso
"To the word you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world." ~Anonymous
"Love is alot like a guitar. The music may stop now and then but the strings remain forever." ~Isaac Hanson
"Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship-never." ~Charles Caleb Colton
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." ~Martin Luther King Jr.
"If you love somebody, let them go. If they return, they were always yours. If they don't. they never were." ~Anonymous
"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get, it's what you are expected to give- which is everything." ~Anonymous
"Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes...just be an illusion." ~Javan
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage." ~Lao-Tzu
"Anglo-Saxon England was born of warfare, remained forever a military society, and came to its end in battle." ~J. R. Lander
"The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memory. This is how people care for themselves. One day you will be good storytellers. Never forget these obligations." ~Barry Lopez
"O England! Model to thy inward greatness, like little body with a might heart." ~William Shakespeare
"Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other." ~Francis Bacon
"Revenge is a king of wild justice,which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." ~Francis Bacon
"The virtue of prosperity is temperaturel the virtue of adversity is fortitude." ~Francis Bacon
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." ~Francis Bacon
"There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved: And therefor it was well said, that it is impossible to love and to be wise." ~Francis Bacon
"A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart." ~Francis Bacon
"A man's own observation, what he finds good of, and what he finds hurt of, is best physic to preserve health." ~Francis Bacon
"A the baggage is to an army, so is riches to virtue." ~Francis Bacon
"No man prospers so suddenly as by others' errors." ~Francis Bacon
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." ~Francis Bacon
"Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business." ~Francis Bacon
"It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him." ~Francis Bacon
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everyone's face but their own." ~Johnathan Swift
"He who neglects to drink of the spring of experience is likely to die of thirst in the desert of ignorance." ~Ling Po
"The divine arts of imagination: imagination, the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow." ~William Blake
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness." ~John Keats
"If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities." ~Maya Angelou
"We live, as we dream-alone." ~Joseph Conrad
"A child's mind is like a bank-whatever you put in, you get back in 10 years with interest." ~Frederick Werthol
"Compounding is the 8th wonder of the world." ~Albert Einstein