Auguste Rodin

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

Benjamin Franklin

They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the days ahead, we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask, "Why are there 40 million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence? Why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God's military agent on earth...? Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order?

Eddie Cantor

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast--you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.

Samuel Johnson

What we hope ever to do with ease we must learn first to do with diligence.

Maureen Dowd

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

St. Francis de Sales

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them--every day begin the task anew.

Gore Vidal

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

A. A. Attanasio

Silence is an easy text to misread.

Andy Warhol

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Francis Beaumont

Let us have a care not to disclose our hearts to those who shut up theirs against us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

Pearl S. Buck

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Eknath Easwaran

Dvanda, the 'pairs of opposites' --happiness and sorrow, good and bad, pleasure and pain, and all the rest-- are the very texture of Māyā. Self-will thrives on these dualities, especially likes and dislikes; they are the ego's way of self-expression.

In every country and every community, no matter whether rich or poor, there is a rare type of person who from birth has very little self-will, who can forbear and forgive very easily. People like this are like freestone peaches; you have only to open them up and the seed of self-will falls out easily. The vast majority of us, however, are cling-peach types; the seed seems glued to the rest of the peach. . . .No one is making us cling but ourselves, and it is up to us to let go.

Like a Thousand Suns, p. 84
The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living

Carmel Snow

Elegance is good taste plus a dash of daring.

(Carmel Snow was the editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1934 to 1958.)

Orhan Pamuk

What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears…

Tim Kreider

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year [after surviving a near-death experience] as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/reprieve/