"If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

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

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

""That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed."
— Joseph Heller

"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."
— Joseph Heller (Catch-22)

"“You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.” --Colonel Korn, Catch-22 "
— Joseph Heller

""With a little ingenuity and vision, he had made it all but impossible for anyone in the squadron to talk to him, which was just fine with everyone, he noticed, since no one wanted to talk to him anyway.""
— Joseph Heller

"The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?"
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night — there must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday."
— James Joyce

"I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon."
— Philip Pullman

"I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are."
— Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass)

"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

"Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious impulse, and it is part of our psychological makeup -- of everyone's psychological makeup."
— Philip Pullman

"We don't need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."
— Philip Pullman

"The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocial. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers."
— Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories)

"To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?"
— Angela Carter

"Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"I live in my dreams. Other people live in dreams too . . . just not their own."
— Hermann Hesse

"Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness."
— Hermann Hesse

"Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer."
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain."
— Bob Marley

"Compromise is a stalling between two fools."
— Stephen Fry

"It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue."
— Stephen Fry

"No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)

"We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it."
— Stephen Fry (The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within)

"Happiness is the twinkle in your grandmother's eye as you reverse the tractor off her legs."
— Hugh Laurie

"I love life...Yeah, I'm sad, but at the same time, I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like...It makes me feel alive, you know. It makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt something really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good. So I guess what I'm feeling is like a beautiful sadness. "
— Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park, Raisins, 2003