"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."
— Margaret Atwood

"Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top full
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry "Hold, hold!"
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

"Wonder is what sets us apart from other life forms. No other species wonders about the meaning of existence or the complexity of the universe or themselves."
— Herbert Boyer

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain."
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land)

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right."
— Laurens van der Post

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men afraid of the light"
— Plato

"If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden, or Life in the Woods)

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else. "
— Erma Bombeck

"Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won't have time to make them all yourself. "
— Alfred Sheinwold

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that's gone."
— William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

"Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure."
— Antonio Porchia

"The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple."
— Rebecca West

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
— Aristotle

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
— Albert Einstein

"How far that little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in a weary world."
— William Shakespeare

"Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
"
— Wendell Johnson

"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath."
— Michael Caine

"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. "
— Fred Allen

"'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read."
— Mark Twain

"Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends."
— Tom Waits

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."
— Evelyn Waugh

"Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. "
— Pete Seeger

"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
— William Arthur Ward

"Who, except the gods, can live time through forever without any pain?"
— Aeschylus

"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. "
— Thomas Wolfe

"Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies. Now, you can't advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one's neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice."
— Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
— Confucius

"I held a moment in my hand, brilliant as a star, fragile as a flower, a tiny sliver of one hour. I dripped it carelessly, Ah! I didn't know, I held opportunity."
— Hazel Lee

"The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance and Other Essays)

"Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end."
— Edward Whymper (Scrambles Amongst the Alps)

"Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray."
— George Gordon Byron

"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget."
— Thomas Stephen Szasz

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."
— C.S. Lewis

"Curiosity is a willing, a proud, an eager confession of ignorance."
— S. Leonard Rubinstein

"Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience."
— George Washington

"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire."
— Ferdinand Foch

"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, got French government, and American culture."
— John Colombo

"Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped."
— Sam Levenson

"For four fifths of our history our planet was populated by pond scum."
— J. William Schopf

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."
— André Malraux

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
— Marshall McLuhan

"Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself."
— Doris Lessing

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
— William Butler Yeats (The Wind Among the Reeds 1899)

"Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.