I have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what are the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than three-score years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, that health is a great blessing; competence obtained by honorable industry is a great blessing; and a great blessing it is, to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)
Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Scientist)
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
—Ingrid Bergman (Swedish Actor)
The men who have done big things are those who were not afraid to attempt big things, who were not afraid to risk failure in order to gain success.
—B. C. Forbes (Scottish-born American Journalist)
Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
—Edgar Degas (French Painter)
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hours will last.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)
Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.
—Lillian Hellman (American Playwright)