"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.

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

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
— Friedrich Nietzsche

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"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

"Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. "
— Bill Gates

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
— Ernest Hemingway

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit."
— Bill Cosby (Fatherhood)

"The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague."
— Bill Cosby

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

"Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it."
— Mark Twain

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
— Winston S. Churchill

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)

"Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else."
— Ayn Rand

"I don't like it when I outweigh my men."
— Patricia Briggs (Moon Called)

"The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan."
— Mary Roach (Stiff)

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world."
— Cesare Pavese

"Most intelligent men and women like to go forth into the world and stalk their own prey, choose their own mirrors of dysfunction . . . ."
— Laurie Viera Rigler (Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict)

"It seems there is nothing I cannot find out from my oracle, the computer."
— Laurie Viera Rigler (Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict)

"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before."
— Mae West

"I use to be Snow White, but I drifted."
— Mae West

"I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure."
— Mae West

"There are no good girls gone wrong - just bad girls found out."
— Mae West

"To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kinda scary. I've wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

"I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them."
— Philip Pullman

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."
— David Foster Wallace

"The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, that is true perversion!"
— Harvey Milk

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life."
— Joseph Conrad

"Silly of me not to have realized it. One often finds Greek temples lurking in the woods of English estates. Sneaky things, temples.""
— Victoria Alexander (The Husband List)

"“Every time I think you’ve reached the limits of arrogance, you show me new heights. Truly, your egotism is like the Universe—ever expanding.""
— Ilona Andrews (Magic Strikes)

"“You thought about dragging me into your bed this morning.”
“I thought about stabbing you and running away screaming. You broke into my house without permission and slobbered all over me. You’re a damn lunatic! And don’t give me that line about smelling my desire; I know it’s bullshit.”
“I didn’t need to smell you. I could tell by the dreamy look in your eyes and the way your tongue licked the inside of my mouth.”"
— Ilona Andrews (Magic Strikes)

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

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
— 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

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
— Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It)