"To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble."
— Bill Watterson

"We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. "
— Bill Watterson

"For your information, I'm staying like this, and everyone else can just get used to it! If people don't like me the way I am, well TOUGH BEANS! It's a free country! I don't need anyone's permission to be the way I want! This is who I am - Take it or leave it!"
— Bill Watterson

"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world," Calvin

"Isn't your pants' zipper supposed to be in the front?" Hobbes."
— Bill Watterson

"If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently. "
— Bill Watterson

"Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience."
— Bill Watterson

"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)

"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

"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."
— Milan Kundera

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

""He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
— Milan Kundera

"Humanity's true moral test,its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy:animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
— Milan Kundera

"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into 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)

"Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."
— Milan Kundera

""A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting "
— Milan Kundera

"Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists"
— Milan Kundera

"Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."
— Milan Kundera

"We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it."
— Milan Kundera

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress."
— Milan Kundera

"When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen."
— Milan Kundera (The Art of the Novel)

"People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk."
— Ayn Rand

"Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt, and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it – the total passion for the total height – you’re incapable of anything less."
— Ayn Rand

"Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values."
— Ayn Rand

"When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit."
— Ayn Rand

"Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness."
— Ayn Rand

"The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone."
— Ayn Rand (The Virtue of Selfishness)

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good."
— W.H. Auden (Selected Poems)

"How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me."
— W.H. Auden

"Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye."
— W.H. Auden

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. "
— Wystan Hugh Auden

"I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated."
— W.H. Auden

"Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered."
— W.H. Auden

"The aim of writing poetry is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it.""
— W.H. Auden

"To you, I'm an atheist.
To God, I'm the loyal opposition."
— Woody Allen

"God is silent. Now if only man would shut up."
— Woody Allen

"Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit."
— Aristotle

"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead."
— Aristotle

"Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well."
— Aristotle

"Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way - that is not easy."
— Aristotle

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)