"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
— Edith Wharton

"I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art."
— Constantin Stanislavski (My Life in Art)

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

"[...] 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)

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring barque,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
— William Shakespeare (Great Sonnets)

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know."
— Marsilio Ficino (Letters of Marsilio Ficino: Volume 3)

"A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"I believe that a good children's book should appeal to all people who have not completely lost their original joy and wonder in life. The fact is that I don't make books for children at all. I make them for that part of us, of myself and of my friends, which has never changed, which is still a child."
— Leo Lionni

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
— William Butler Yeats

"Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful."
— John Maeda (The Laws of Simplicity)

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
— Aristotle (Metaphysics)

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries."
— Corita Kent

"If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater, suggest that he wear a tail."
— Fran Lebowitz

"All information of a spiritual or personal nature will have to come from our father, who art in heaven, and I think he's in New York right now."
— Joseph Mitchell