"The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."
— Mark Twain

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

"All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints."
— David Sedaris (Holidays on Ice)

"I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?"
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

""The drama bug strikes hardest with Jews, homosexuals and plump women who wear their hair in bangs. These are people who, for one reason or another, desperately crave attention""
— David Sedaris

"And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."
— Milan Kundera

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by an aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
— Milan Kundera

"Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning-"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car."
— Garrison Keillor

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
— Oscar Wilde

"Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
— Mark Twain

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"
— Mark Twain

"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."
— Mark Twain

"While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats."
— Mark Twain

"Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned."
— Mark Twain

"What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche