All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality—the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
—A. C. Benson (English Essayist)
Adversity is the first path to truth: He who hath proved war, storm or woman’s rage, whether his winters be eighteen or eighty, has won the experience which is deem’d so weighty.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (English Romantic Poet)
You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things—to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.
—Edmund Hillary (New Zealander Explorer)
If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
—Margaret Mead (American Anthropologist)
Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same—and most mothers kiss and scold together.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
The drying up a single tear has more of honest fame, than shedding seas of gore.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (English Romantic Poet)
That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
Mistakes are often the best teachers.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
—C. S. Lewis (Irish-born British Children’s Books Writer)