Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
—Blaise Cendrars (Swiss Poet, Writer)
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage—he won’t encounter many rivals.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Philosopher, Physicist)
We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Clergyman, Aphorist)
Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble.
—Arabic Proverb
Don’t try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.
—Marva Collins (American Educator)
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
—Jodi Picoult (American Novelist)
They… threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this—animated, but collateral.
—Rose Macaulay (British Author)
Nature thrives on patience; man on impatience.
—Paul Boese
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
—Alain de Botton (Swiss-born British Philosopher)
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
—G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)