"A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."
— Leo Tolstoy

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.""
— Leo Tolstoy

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"Intellectual passion drives out sensuality. "
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Let no man pull you low enough to hate him."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
— Socrates

"Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain."
— Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
— Jack Kerouac

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
— Jack Kerouac

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream"
— Jack Kerouac

"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"What is hell? I still maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."
— J.D. Salinger

"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."
— J.D. Salinger

"Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first."
— Jim Morrison

"Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.""
— Jim Morrison

"Where's you will to be weird?"
— Jim Morrison

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
— Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles)

"Don't criticize what you can't understand."
— Bob Dylan

"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. "
— Augusten Burroughs (Magical Thinking: True Stories)

"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)

"Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"'There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.'

'There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.'"
— Simone de Beauvoir (All Men Are Mortal)

"--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.
--But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)

"Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter, try again, fail again, fail better."
— Samuel Beckett

"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
— Samuel Beckett

"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent."
— Samuel Beckett (Endgame)

"If you don't know where you are currently standing, your dead"
— Samuel Beckett (Happy Days)

"Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back."
— Samuel Beckett

"Estragon: People are bloody ignorant apes."
— Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts)

"Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere."
— Samuel Beckett

"The end is in the beginning and yet you go on."
— Samuel Beckett (Endgame)

"Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little."
— Samuel Beckett