"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
— Albert Camus

"The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"...the idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?"
— Henry David Thoreau

"I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest."
— Henry David Thoreau (On the Duty of Civil Disobedience)

"And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

"There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle."
— G.K. Chesterton

"...Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out..."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?--TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.
Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature--a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers)

"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' in as unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of history."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so."
— Michael Crichton (Prey)

"“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.” "
— James Baldwin

"As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust."
— Charles W. Chesnutt

"It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. . . . A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive--and nowhere else!--and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . . . .
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers)

"The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour."
— Kenneth Rexroth

"I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"The girl in your class who suggests that this year the Drama Club put on The Bald Soprano will be a thorn in people's sides all of her life."
— Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life/Social Studies)