Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
—Victor Hugo (French Novelist)
Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)
To yackety-yak about the past is for me time lost. Every morning I wake up saying, ‘I’m still alive—a miracle.’ And so I keep on pushing.
—Jacques Cousteau (French Military Leader)
Philosophy is a purely personal matter. A genuine philosopher’s credo is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same philosophy.
—Havelock Ellis (British Sexologist)
The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)
People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you’ve got to keep your feet warm.
—Denis Diderot (French Philosopher)
It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (American Atheist Politician)