"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
— Charles Darwin (Origin of Species)

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."
— George Burns

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
— Abraham Lincoln

"I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. "
— W.C. Fields

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

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

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
— Groucho Marx

"I hate clowns. I've mentioned that, right?"
— D.J. MacHale, Bobby Pendragon (The Quillan Games)

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

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
— Mark Twain

"I love you like a fat kid loves cake!"
— Scott Adams

"Humor is reason gone mad."
— Groucho Marx

"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Penguins, lovely."
— Stephenie Meyer (Eclipse)

"People, generally, suck."
— Christopher Moore

"Edward - I wasn't about to send you off alone. With your luck, not even the black box would survive.
Bella - So let's say my bad luck did crash the plane. What exactly were you going to do about it?
Edward - Why is the plane crashing?
He was trying to hide a smile now.
Bella - The pilots are passed out drunk.
Edward - Easy. I'd fly the plane.
Of course. I pursed my lips and tried again.
Bella - Both engines have exploded and we're falling in a death spiral toward the earth.
Edward - I'd wait till we were close enough to the ground, get a good grip on you, kick out the wall, and jump. Then I'd run you back to the scene of the accident, and we'd stumble around like the two luckiest survivors in history.
I stared at him wordlessly.
"What?" he whispered."
— Stephenie Meyer (Eclipse)

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
— Douglas Adams

"Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch."
— Orson Welles

"Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident."
— Mark Twain

"Chase your dreams until you catch them...and then dream, catch, and dream again! "
— Dee Marie (Sons of Avalon: Merlin's Prophecy)

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
— Ernest Hemingway

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

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
— Ernest Hemingway

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change"
— Charles Darwin

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life."
— Charles Darwin

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
— Richard Dawkins

"Only sick music makes money today."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy)

"The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the
more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to
this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"And finally, to call to mind the
enormous influence which "German philosophy"--I hope you understand its right to inverted commas-"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.
It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.
He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers--and spirit itself will stink.
Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.
Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace.
He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.
In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall.
The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near and the spirit full of a joyful wickedness: thus are things well matched.
I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous. The courage which scareth away ghosts, createth for itself goblins--it wanteth to laugh."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All)

"i have never pondered over questions that are not questions."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo)

"All truth is simple ... is that not doubly a lie?"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"...and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:

I HARDLY HEAR THE PURLIEU CRY
OR A TOMMY TALK AS I PASS ONE BY
BEFORE MY THOUGHTS BEGIN TO RUN
ON F. M'CURDY ATKINSON,
THE SAME THAT HAD THE WOODEN LEG
AND THAT FILIBUSTERING FILIBEG
THAT NEVER DARED TO SLAKE HIS DROUTH,
MAGEE THAT HAD THE CHINLESS MOUTH.
BEING AFRAID TO MARRY ON EARTH
THEY MASTURBATED FOR ALL THEY WERE WORTH.

Jest on. Know thyself."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"The tongue like a sharp knife... Kills without drawing blood."
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"the city seen from the queensboro bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"He smiled understandingly- much more than understandingly. It was
one of those smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it,
that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-
or seemed to face- the whole external world for an instant, and
then concentrated on you with an irresistable prejudice in your favour.
It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood,
believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself
and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that,
at your best, you hoped to convey."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"There must have been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically when they read ... Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Diamond As Big As the Ritz & Other Stories)

"It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

""... there's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--"
a small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the potomac."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)