In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
—Salman Rushdie (Indian-born British Novelist)
Every error of the mind is the more conspicuous, and culpable, in proportion to the rank of the person who commits it.
—Juvenal (Roman Poet)
There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
—Thomas Mann (German Novelist)
A wise lover values not so much the gift of the lover as the love of the giver.
—Thomas a Kempis (German Religious Writer)
A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)
If you can’t stand the heat, you’d better get out of the kitchen.
—Harry S. Truman (American Head of State)
That’s the secret to life … replace one worry with another.
—Charles M. Schulz (American Cartoonist)
The most important thing about getting somewhere is starting right where we are.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton (American Advertising Executive)
Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)
Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian Novelist)
Let a man leave anger, let him forsake pride, let him overcome all bondage! No sufferings befall the man who is not attached to name and form, and who calls nothing his own.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)
High thoughts must have high language.
—Aristophanes (Greek Comic Playwright)
Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.
—Christopher Hitchens (Anglo-American Social Critic)