Than Quotes

I like my films to have a certain amount of realism - something that's thought provoking and intelligently written. More than the amount on the pay cheque, I look for a level of respectability as an actor. ~ Arjun Rampal

A sculptor will more easily extract a beautiful statue from a piece of rough marble than from one that has been badly blocked out by someone else. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Most androids I've known have more vitality and desire to live than my wife. ~ Philip K. Dick

Knowing the right questions is better than knowing all the right answers Caleb from Pretty Little Liars (TV Show) ~ Sara Shepard

The war against the Canadian seal hunt is more than a protest. It is a crusade to bring harmony between the natural world and humanity. All of us who oppose it are dedicated to the protection of life and the abolition of cruelty. ~ Paul Watson

In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future. ~ Stendhal

The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy. ~ John Quincy Adams

In rural Spain, at least, it is far better to arrive than to travel, however hopefully. ~ Honor Tracy

A monster, in comparison, can be no more than a guide -- unless it fuses (like Yog Sothoth) into the enveloping extracosmic fabric, as a super-sentient concentration of doors. ~ Nick Land

There are many more languages than one imagines. And man reveals himself much more often than he wishes. So many things that speak! But there are always so few listeners, so that man, so to speak, only chatters in a void when he engages in confessions. He wastes his truths just as the sun wastes its light. Isn't it too bad that the void has no ears? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools. ~ Andre Gide

Stereotype threat, then, is one way our national history seeps into our daily lives. That history leaves us with stereotypes about groups in our society that can be used to judge us as individuals when we're in situations where those stereotypes apply - in the seat next to a black person on an airplane or interacting with minority students, for example. The white person in that situation will not want to be seen in terms of the stereotype of whites as racially insensitive. And the black person, for his or her part, will not want to be seen in terms of the stereotypes about blacks as aggressive, or as too easily seeing prejudice, and so on. Fighting off these possible perceptions on a long airline flight - or more famously, perhaps, in a school cafeteria - could be more than either party wants to take on. They just want to have lunch or get to Cleveland. Avoidance becomes the simplest solution. ~ Claude M. Steele

I know less than you thought, but more than you realize. ~ Jasmine Wilmany

You don't get to know anybody in a movie until after it's over. You work less together in a film than you do onstage. ~ Al Pacino

Thrown rocks can only hit a bird who is soaring lower than it is capable of. ~ C. Fulsty

You will make better decisions once you begin thinking long-term rather than short-term. ~ Adam Kirk Smith

Once you're in the military, she means a lot more to you than just a grandmother. She is the queen. And then you suddenly, it's like start realizing, you know, wow, this is quite a big deal. And then you get goose bumps and then the rest of it. ~ Prince Harry

Those Christians who are very strict in their observances, think a good deal more of the Sabbath than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth, and ten times more of their creed than of the will of God. Of course, if they heard anyone utter such words as I have just written, they would say he was and atheist. ~ George MacDonald

But, in the words of a Portuguese proverb, "God writes straight with crooked lines", and He is far more interested in getting us where He wants us to be than we are in getting there. He does not discuss things with us. He leads us faithfully and plainly as we trust Him and simply do the next thing. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

Happiness is the peace of mind that comes from feeling that I am living a worthy life in the company of people I love and in the service of something bigger than myself. ~ Michael Josephson

Material is more important than method. ~ Sven Kohlhaas

Digital data are more fragile than printed material. ~ Robert Darnton

Dessert is my reward for having met my goals during the day. Really, dessert is an event rather than a specific item. ~ Jen Lancaster

I was happier when pursuing success than I was when savoring its fruits; the attraction, perhaps the addiction, was in the process, as much as in its end. ~ Michael Steinhardt

Business men are to be pitied who do not recognize the fact that the largest side of their secular business is benevolence ... No man ever manages a legitimate business in this life without doing indirectly far more for other men than he is trying to do for himself. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

People always say it's changelings who most crave touch, but that's not the truth. A long time ago, long before Silence, Psy craved it more than any other.
He let her words was over him like affectionate rain. His mate, his mate, was trying to temper his grief, trying to tell him they weren't so very different after all. ~ Nalini Singh

The silence was deafening, pressing more heavily on Hollyleaf's ears than the stones that pinned her to the cold floor. ~ Erin Hunter

She made 'pig' sound like a much worse word than it was. Pigs were quite nice. ~ Kate Atkinson

Patience is the deep acceptance that things should be exactly as they are. Most times that's easier said than done. - L. R. W. Lee ~ L.R.W. Lee

When we look to God as provider, we are surrendering our independence and trusting someone else to meet our needs, over which we have no control. Letting go of our 'dependence on independence' and letting someone else take control goes against natural human instinct. We need to fight the urge to take over and just let God be God, because He can provide for us better than we can. ~ Corallie Buchanan

Eugenie, you're a woman without equal, and no matter how much you annoy the hell out of me and no matter how much I try to get you out of my head - and believe me, both occur regularly - I can't stay away from you. Even if you were barren, I'd take you as my consort in an instant and spend the rest of my life with you - childless, so long as it meant you'd be by my side. I would gladly bring you to my bed with no other thoughts than taking joy from your body. It would be enough.
- Dorian ~ Richelle Mead

Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece - all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round - more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back. ~ Mark Twain

Sharpe had no thought of deserting now, for now he was about to fight. If there was any one good reason to join the army, it was to fight. Not to hurry up and do nothing, but to fight the King's enemies, and this enemy had been shocked by the awful violence of the close-range volley and now they stared in horror as the redcoats screamed and ran towards them. The 33rd, released from the tight discipline of the ranks, charged eagerly. There was loot ahead. Loot and food and stunned men to slaughter and there were few men in the 33rd who did not like a good fight. Not many had joined the ranks out of patriotism; instead, like Sharpe, they had taken the King's shilling because hunger or desperation had forced them into uniform, but they were still good soldiers. They came from the gutters of Britain where a man survived by savagery rather than by cleverness. They were brawlers and bastards, alley-fighters with nothing to lose but tuppence a day. ~ Bernard Cornwell

The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all. ~ Josiah Royce

It's better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use 'em, abuse 'em and utilize 'em. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It was easier to agree than to tell the truth. ~ Susan Beth Pfeffer

All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them. ~ George Orwell

In the eyes of high morality, to be a victim is always more honourable than to be a killer! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Ghosts

Take shape under moonlight,
materialize in dreams.
Shadows. Silhouettes
of what is no more. But

ghosts don't

bother me. The day brings
bigger things to worry about
than flimsy remains of
yesterday. No, spooks don't

scare me.

Gauzy apparitions might
prank your psyche or
agitate your nightmares,
but lacking

flesh and blood

they are powerless
to hurt you-cannot hope
to inflict the kind of damage
that real, live

people do. ~ Ellen Hopkins

We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good. ~ Cornel West

Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo. ~ Herbert J. Muller

A woman is like a universe; there are many things that even she still needs to discover about herself. Men on the other hand are miners, which means they are in a better position to uncover, perceive and appreciate things about women that they themselves have not yet come to the full realization of. Men know more about women than they can tell (it's for their own safety that they keep their mouths shut and pretend like they don't know anything, lest they get slammed for claming to know anything at all about women in the first place). Sadly, women are losing out on a wealth of knowledge and understanding about themselves by debunking men's ideas and notions about them especially when it comes to their femininity and sensuality. I think there is a need for women to start gently and safely asking men what they 'inherently' know about their femininity. I'm not a chauvinist nor a proponent for men's rights, but I strongly believe that men hold the keys to a lot of treasure chests that most women are daily striving to open up. Perhaps you should start inviting your man to get a little bit more involved in your feminine/sensual journey. It's only a suggestion... ~ Lebo Grand

Like me wanting to get nailed made me less of a man than him? That was bullshit. He seemed kind of sexist. I bet he was a fucking Republican. ~ Megan Erickson

The word "YouTuber," even though - listen, I love YouTube, and I would never, ever abandon it, but I think when somebody says "Youtuber" it says "Oh, they talk about what they ate that day." That's not me - I do way more than that. ~ Shane Dawson

No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

I don't think college is for everyone. School is awesome, but for me, I was learning a lot more outside the classroom in the real world than I was in school. ~ Blake Mycoskie

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common - this is my symphony. ~ William Ellery Channing

Step 1 in casting vision is to make sure your people love Jesus more than they love the vision you are casting. ~ Matthew Carter

I was a little truth seeker as a child. I wanted more than anything to understand myself and also other people. ~ Cynthia Kenyon

Just when I despaired -- she was there, filling me as a melody fills a cottage. I was with her, running beside the Acis when we were a child. I knew the ancient villa moated by a dark lake, the view through the dusty windows of the belvedere, and the secret space in the odd angle between two rooms where we sat at noon to read by candlelight. I knew the life of the Autarch's court, where poison waited in a diamond cup. I learned what it was for one who had never seen a cell or felt a whip to be a prisoner of the torturers, what dying meant, and death.

I learned that I had been more to her than I had ever guessed, and at last fell into a sleep in which my dreams were all of her. Not memories merely -- memories I had possessed in plenty before. I held her poor, cold hands in mine, and I no longer wore the rags of an apprentice, nor the fuligin of a journeyman. We were one, naked and happy and clean, and we knew that she was no more and that I still lived, and we struggled against neither of those things, but with woven hair read from a single book and talked and sang of other matters. ~ Gene Wolfe

A marriage is meant to be a blessing on the world, because it is a context in which two people might become more than what they would have been alone. The entire world is healed by the presence of healed people. ~ Marianne Williamson

Wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting. ~ Eckhart Tolle

And nobody knows your weak spots better than sisters. Those prissy little virgins, Artemis and Athena, always looking down their smug, goody-goody noses at her. ~ Julie Berry

He was beautiful.
Whatever else he was, Sage was by far the most magnetic man I had ever seen. I had felt it in my dreams, and it was even more true in real life. I welcomed the chance to study him without his knowledge.
He glanced up, and I quickly closed my eyes, feigning sleep. Had he seen me? The scratching stopped. He was looking at me, I knew it. I held my breath and willed my eyes not to pop open and see if he was staring.
Finally the scratching started up again. I forced myself to slowly count to ten before I opened my eyelids the tiniest bit and peeked through my lashes.
Good-he wasn't looking at me.
I opened my eyes a little wider. What was he doing? Moving only my eyes, I glanced down at the dirt floor in front of him…
…and saw a picture of me, fast asleep.
It was incredible. I could see his tools laid out beside the picture: rocks in several sizes and shapes, a couple of twigs…the most rudimentary materials, and yet what he was etching into the floor wouldn't look out of place on an art gallery wall. It was beautiful…far more beautiful than I thought I actually looked in my sleep. Is that how he saw me?
Sage lifted his head again, and I shut my eyes. I imagined him studying me, taking careful note of my features and filtering them through his own senses. My heartbeat quickened, and it took all my willpower to remain still.
"You can keep pretending to be asleep if you'd like, but I don't see a career for you as an actres ~ Hilary Duff

It's not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. ~ Susan Cain

Over the past decades, students who have blindly followed their passion, without rational analysis of whether their choice of career truly was wise, have been more unhappy with their job choices than those who coupled passion with rationality. ~ Barbara Oakley

But I killed a man just like my mother did. David says it's okay because I didn't mean to, and because he was about to kill that little kid. But I'm pretty sure my mom didn't mean to kill my dad, either, so what difference does that make, meaning or not meaning to do something? Accident or on purpose, the result is the same, and that's one fewer life than there should be in the world. ~ Veronica Roth

In almost every instance, air and water quality goals were met more cheaply and quickly when we taxed pollution than when we tried to regulate it directly. ~ Bob Frank

To me death is better than the defensive. ~ Alexander Suvorov

In my dear pine-clad mountains of the Harz There's a pitchlike smell, a smell I favor Most of all, excepting that of sulphur. But here among these Greeks there's not a trace Of anything like that. I'm curious To find out what they use below in their Hell To stoke the fires with, their kind of fuel. DRYAD. I guess you're smart enough in your own country, Abroad you're something less than apt; 8220 Stop thinking home thoughts, try, Sir, to adapt And show due honor to our sacred oak tree. MEPHISTO. What you have lost, that's what you think about, ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In many ways, Tucker Carlson's a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following. ~ Alex Pareene

That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar. ~ Julian Casablancas

I guess all I'm trying to say is that language may be large, unwieldy, and in a perpetual state of transformation - in other words, language is like love - but, unlike Dr. D, I don't think it's greater than we are. I think it's our duty, in fact, to corral it into coherence; to suppress its more unruly tendencies; to verify its meaning and, more importantly, its efficacy; to test its subjectivity-bridging potential. (Again, we should treat it very much like love.) ~ Alena Graedon

When I was a nursemaid at the home of the landowners, a nun who happened to pass once gave me something square and white.Timidly I licked it and discovered that it was sweet and delicious. I realize now that it must have been a sugar cube;but still, more than twenty years later, I remember clearly the joy I felt then. It's not just children; everyone seems to be deeply touched by unexpected joy brought to them by others and is unable to forget it.
That child will be grown up by now, and if he hasn't forgotten me, whenever he sees a crying child he'll want to say a kind word and wipe the kid's nose. And when that kid grows up, he'll do the same. To do something kind for another is never a bad feeling; it fosters a spirit of caring for other people. And who knows,after a hundrend years, human beings may even learn to cooperate with one another...Yes, that was it: I'd try to teach children that if they felt glad when someone gave them a single piece of candy,then they in turn should give to others. ~ Sayo Masuda

I guess I could drive myself crazy trying to figure out why he left me but I can't, all I can do is move on, Parisa replied, the words came out smoother and easier than she expected. ~ A. Petrov

Sometimes the price of doing the right thing is higher than we realize when we do it. ~ Rachel Aaron

We're all brought up to believe that the best players show up in the biggest games, and what bigger game than the Super Bowl? I've just been blessed and very lucky to have two of my best games on that stage. ~ Justin Tuck

I don't know what's more embarrassing, these musicians and actors talking about politics in interviews or the media actually giving them credibility about it. It's absurd that a celebrity could speak out on the economy or politics with no more justification than a hit album or a movie. ~ Paul Stanley

Me personally, I don't have anything against Jesus any more than I do any of the religious icons. I think they're all pretty funny. ~ Jack Black

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. ~ G.K. Chesterton

This is my family, and the noise around me is soothing in a way it hasn't been in quite a long time. That's mostly my doing, I know, given my self-imposed exile in the Land of Sorrow. But hearing the overlapping voices and laughter, seeing the bright eyes and smiles, does more for me than I thought it could. ~ T.J. Klune

crossed her arms and stared back at him. "I really don't have to tell you anything." "No, you really don't." He pointed to the cops and detectives. "But those guys you do. And I'd have a better story prepared than the bullshit you just tried to feed me." Myers rose. "I need to attend to some things." "I'm sure. Calling a really good lawyer should be first on the list." She hurried from the room and disappeared down the hall to her office. On a hunch Puller went over to the bar where one of the waiters was sitting looking exhausted. He held up his set of keys and said, "Ms. Myers asked me to get something from her car, but she was so distraught she forgot to tell me what make and model." The man said, "Oh, it's the blue BMW 750. License plate says 'Grunt.' She parks it in the back lot." "Thanks. ~ David Baldacci

Accept people, don't stereotype people. Don't think because right now they're driving a cab, they're not going to have a master's degree or that they're dumber than you. ~ Isabel Coixet

The unmarried woman seldom escapes a widowhood of the spirit. There is sure to be some one, parent, brother, sister, friend, more comfortable to her than the day, with whom her life is so entwined that the wrench of parting leaves a torn void never entirely healed or filled ... ~ Charlotte Mary Yonge

Wealth does not count; words do not count; actions count! ~ Dada J. P. Vaswani

My mother and I looked at each other then, full in the face, more frankly than we'd done since I was small. I realized with a jolt that I was taller than she was by at least half a foot. When on earth had that happened? The realization made me want to sit down on the stairs and cry. It seemed to signify something terrible about the world: something that couldn't - or mustn't- be put into words. And I could see, looking down into her startled, anxious face, that my mother felt exactly the same way. ~ John Wray

I can't think of a more natural experience in my entire life than playing with Mike Dean, Woody Weatherman again. I really learned how to play with them in terms of drumming. ~ Reed Mullin

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art - she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent's Park, rain in the street outside - a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

A key point to bear in mind: The value of attentiveness varies in proportion to its object. You're better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses. ~ Max Aitken

If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist. You know what it's like, writing, it's torture. ~ John Lennon

A preacher should have the skill to teach the unlearned simply roundly, and plainly; for teaching is of more importance than exhorting. ~ Martin Luther

Girls and women, in their new, particular unfolding, will only in passing imitate men's behavior and misbehavior and follow in male professions. Once the uncertainty of such transitions is over it will emerge that women have only passed through the spectrum and the variety of those (often laughable) disguises in order to purify their truest natures from the distorting influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life abides and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more trustingly, are bound to have ripened more thoroughly, become more human human beings, than a man, who is all too light and has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit and who, in his arrogance and impatience, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity which inhabits woman, brought to term in pain and humiliation, will, once she has shrugged off the conventions of mere femininity through the transformations of her outward status, come clearly to light, and men, who today do not yet feel it approaching, will be taken by surprise and struck down by it. One day (there are already reliable signs which speak for it and which begin to spread their light, especially in the northern countries), one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being.

This ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I've always loved horror, I've always loved collecting, I've always loved weird and macabre things, and I've always loved conventions. So what could be better than having your own Fear FestEviL where all those great and crazy things can be enjoyed by like-minded people under one pretty cool roof? Nothing! ~ Kirk Hammett

PICARD: Did you read that book I gave you? (Wesley reacts, barely concealing a grimace as he recalls.)
WESLEY: Some of it.
PICARD: That's reassuring.
WESLEY: I just don't have much time.
PICARD: (re the book in his hand) There is no greater challenge than the study of philosophy. (Wesley glances over at Picard's book)
WESLEY: William James sure won't be on my Starfleet exams.
PICARD: The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained to deal with technology, and the mechanics of piloting a starship.
WESLEY: But Starfleet Academy--
PICARD: It takes more than just that. Open your mind to the past... to history, art, philosophy. And then... (re: the stars) ...this will mean something.
(Wesley considers this, almost embarrassed as he realizes Picard does truly care about him.)
Then: PICARD (continuing) Just consider James' wisdom: "Philosophy... is not a technical matter... it is our sense of what life honestly means... our individual way of feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos."
(then) That's what I want for you.

From:
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION
"Samaritan Snare" #40272-143
Written by Robert L. McCullough ~ Jean-Luc Picard

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.
Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence's poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.
And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of 'mere things,' when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – an ~ Aldous Huxley

As I see the world, there's one element that's even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It's not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection. ~ Tahir Shah

It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man
that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times
whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays
I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!' But having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy! ~ Thomas Hardy

This is what it
means to create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos. A creative scientist or historian does not make
up facts but orders facts; he sees connections between them rather than seeing them as random data. A creative writer does not
make up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us. ~ Harold S. Kushner

I wanted to go higher than Rockefeller Center, which was being erected across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue and was going to cut off my view of the sky ... Flying got into my soul instantly but the answer as to why must be found somewhere back in the mystic maze of my birth and childhood and the circumstances of my earlier life. Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars. ~ Jacqueline Cochran

If you could use the Internet somehow to see how a Fiji sailor is doing, rather than having to read a text version of it somewhere a day later, that would be great. ~ Dennis Miller

An original pebble is better than a counterfeit diamond. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Ergo, while the Argument from Design appears to be a nice, neat answer to account for the presence of a multifarious Universe, the truth is that it backfires on itself, shifting the need for an explanation back and back and back…and back…without end, without resolution. This is called an infinite regress, and its presence in the logic of the argument fails to prove the existence of God; if anything, it reveals that the idea of a designer is patently ridiculous, even more so than a godless Cosmos. The argument therefore answers nothing; it merely moves the mystery of origins to an even higher level, demanding that the Creator have his own Creator. ~ Michael Vito Tosto

What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
"Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.
It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure. ~ Thomas Pynchon

The nations of the earth that most vigorously foul the planetary nest and those in possession of the most destructive arsenals ought to be governed only by young women with small kids. More than anyone else, such mothers must live in the future, and they also face each day the realities of raw human nature.. This gives them a special insight, ~ Mary Doria Russell

I don't believe that happily ever after means we never have disagreements or go through conflicts. What I do believe is that there is someone who is willing to stick through all of these things with me, because we love each other more than we love ourselves. ~ Marilyn Grey

Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world to be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims? ~ John O. Brennan

I know I'm going to have to get beyond being George H.W. Bush's son and Barbara's son
for which I'm really proud. And I'm going to get beyond being George W.'s brother for which I am extraordinarily proud as well, there's a lot of interest in finding the ways that we are different and all this. Well, the simple fact is that we're all on our own life's journey
my brothers and sister are different than me. ~ Jeb Bush

I'd say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts. ~ Stephen King

Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. ~ C.S. Lewis