Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
—Henry Ward Beecher (American Protestant Clergyman)
Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Men strive for peace, but it is their enemies that give them strength, and I think if man no longer had enemies, he would have to invent them, for his strength only grows from struggle.
—Louis L’Amour
There is a noble manner of being poor, and who does not know it will never be rich.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Philosopher)
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
—John F. Kennedy (American Head of State)
My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.
—Thomas Jefferson (American Head of State)
Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)
To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.
—Carl Jung (Swiss Psychologist)
Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
—James Russell Lowell (American Poet)