If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you… . The world will be yours and everything in it, what’s more, you’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling (British Children’s Books Writer)
The more I see the less I know for sure.
—John Lennon (British Singer)
No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.
—John Ruskin (English Art Critic)
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
—Doris Lessing (British Novelist, Poet)
It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs are tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labor of the day is gone. A gentle failure of the perceptions creeps over you; the spirit of consciousness disengages itself once more, and with slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the mind seems to have a balmy lid closing over it, like the eye—it is closed—the mysterious spirit has gone to take its airy rounds.
—Leigh Hunt (British Author)
He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (British Author, Politician)
My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring.
—Anne Bronte (English Novelist, Poet)
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused? Experience, old people’s experience.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) (Danish Novelist, Short-story Writer)
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
—Michel Foucault (French Philosopher)
When strangers start acting like neighbors… communities are reinvigorated.
—Ralph Nader (American Activist)
No man can pass into eternity, for he is already in it.
—Frederic William Farrar (British Theological Writer)
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
—Rene Descartes (French Mathematician, Philosopher)
For him who has no concentration, there is no tranquility.
—The Bhagavad Gita (Hindu Scripture)