All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

Oscar Wilde

Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

Marilyn Monroe

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

Mahatma Gandhi

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Tennessee Williams

“Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.”

Susan Cheever

Dr. House: Ah, yes, but as the philosopher Jagger once said, 'You can't always get what you want.'

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keep out the joy.

Jim Rohn

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not here the music

(Many people have claimed credit to this quote, frankly I wish i had thought it up. This is one of my all time favorite quotes!)

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man."

F.M. Dostoevsky, The Idiot

"Our life is a book to which we add daily, until suddenly we are finished, and then the manuscript is burned."

J.M.Barrie

Evil is unspectacular, and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our table.

W. H. Auden

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."

Einstein

"From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate."

Socrates

"In order to learn the important lessons in life, one must, each day, surmount a fear."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

Albert Einstein

Be not simply good - be good for something.

Henry David Thoreau

"If you want to know what a man is like, see how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter

"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito..."
African Proverb

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.

FREEMAN DYSON

"The lights are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime"

British statesman Sir Edward Grey on the eve of the First World War

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

EDWARD ABBEY (1927-89)

You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.

Sheila Graham

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Albert Einstein

A joke is a very serious thing.

Winston Churchill

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

Buddha

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

Mother Teresa

Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts.

John Wooden

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

Abraham Lincoln

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

Thomas Jefferson

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

Maya Angelou

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

Dalai Lama

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Mohandas Gandhi

A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

A throne is only a bench covered with velvet.

Napoleon Bonaparte

I believe in one thing only, the power of human will.

Joseph Stalin

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

Margaret Thatcher

Cowards die many times before their actual deaths.

Julius Caesar

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.

Walt Disney

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

Karl Marx

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.

Jimi Hendrix

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

William Shakespeare

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Edgar Allan Poe

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye