"L'infer c'est les autres"
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Some things are too important to be taken seriously."
— Oscar Wilde

"A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young."
— Oscar Wilde

"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
— Aristotle

"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does."
— Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)

"Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."
— Alberto Manguel

"Think before you speak. Read before you think."
— Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life/Social Studies)