"This is the precious present, regardless of what yesterday was like, regardless of what tomorrow may bring. When your inner eyes open, you can find immense beauty hidden within the inconsequential details of daily life. When your inner ears open, you can hear the subtle, lovely music of the universe everywhere you go. When the heart of your heart opens, you can take deep pleasure in the company of the people around you -- family, friends, acquaintances, or strangers -- including those whose characters are less than perfect, just as your character is less than perfect. When you are open to the beauty, mystery, and grandeur of ordinary existence, you "get it" that it has always been beautiful, mysterious, and grand and always will be. This is the precious present."
-Timothy Ray Miller-

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all."
-Helen Keller-

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

"Our background and circumstances may influence who we are, but we are responsible for who we become."
-Unknown-

"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around."
-Leo Buscaglia-

"In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself."
-Laurence Sterne-

"Nothing is evil which is according to nature."
-Marcus Aurelius-

"In the Battle of Life, it is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. It is not the intellectual who counts; the world is full of educated fools. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but because he does strive to do the deeds, he knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."
-Theodore Roosevelt-

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
-Dwight Eisenhower-

"The important thing is to not stop questioning."
-Albert Einstein-

"The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder."
-Frantz Fanon-

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

"I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong."
-Leo Rosten-

"An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind."
-Buddha-

"Even from a dark night songs of beauty can be born."
-Maryanne Radmacher-Hershey-

"I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood, too..."
-E. M. Forster-

"I am liberating man from the degrading chimera known as 'conscience'."
-Adolf Hitler-

"Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer."
-Ed Cunningham-

"Our real blessings often appear to us in the shapes of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience, and we soon shall see them in their proper figures."
-Joseph Addison-

"Most people never listen."
-Ernest Hemingway-

"It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites."
-Henry Miller-

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
-George Bernard Shaw-

"Don't worry about life, you're not going to survive it anyway."
-Anonymous-

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education."
-Bertrand Russell-

"Most of the great men of this world live as if they were atheists."
-Voltaire-

"Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God."
-Jean Rostand-

"It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the evil to suspect good."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-

"If the Bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would have believed it."
-William Jennings Bryan-

"The human understanding is not dry light, but is infused by desire and emotion, which give rise to "wishful science." For man prefers to believe what he wants to be true. He therefore rejects difficulties, being impatient of inquiry; sober things, because they restrict his hope; deeper parts of Nature because of his superstition; the light of experience because of his arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to concern itself with things mean and transitory; things that are strange and contrary to all expectation, because of common opinion. In short, emotion in numerous, often imperceptible ways pervades and infects the understanding."
-Francis Bacon-

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."
-Eric Hoffer-

"When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him."
-Jonathon Swift-

"Perhaps the evil in human beings isn't a reflection of the devil; perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our own kind. Maybe what we have done is create the devil in our own image."
-Anonymous-

"Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl."
-Stephen Leacock-

"People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain."
-Jim Morrison-

"Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary."
-Louisa May Alcott-

"At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. You can love completely without complete understanding."
-Norman Maclean-

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-George Orwell-

"Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon..."
-Terry Pratchet-

"Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others."
-Oscar Wilde-

"The true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpacked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."
-Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn-

"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it."
-General H. Norman Schwarzkopf-

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
-Joseph Stalin-

"Badness is only spoiled goodness."
-C.S. Lewis-

"Plant impossible gardens. Look forward to dreams. Cry during movies. Swing as high as you can on a swingset, by moonlight. Cultivate moods. Do it for love. Take lots of naps. Take moonbaths. Giggle with children. Listen to old people. Drive away fear. Play with everything. Entertain your inner child. Build a fort with blankets. Get wet. Hug trees. Write love letters."
-Sark-

"Whether angels or devils pursue me,
In the dark I cannot tell..."
-Romanian song, 13th Century-

"My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in the house there lurked: the evil scissors."
-Tony Martin-

"The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved."
-Victor Hugo-

"No good deed goes unpunished."
-Clare Boothe Luce-

"Sticks and stones are hard on bones
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything
But silence breaks the heart."
-Suzanne Nichols-

"Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either."
-Golda Meir-

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
-Anais Nin-

"And therefore a man who has no great passion for any of these things but is, as men term it, indifferent, though he may be so far a good man as to be free from giving offense, yet he cannot possibly have either a great fancy or much judgement. For the thoughts are to the desires as scouts and spies, to range abroad and find the way to the things desired, all steadiness of the mind's motion, and all quickness of the same, proceeding from thence; for as to have no desire is to be dead, so to have weak passions is dullness; and to have passions indifferently for everything, giddiness and distraction; and to have stronger and more vehement passions for anything than is ordinarily seen in others is that which men call madness."
-Thomas Hobbes-

"I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism."
-Roberto Rossellini-

"Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You're able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others, without being crippled by your own judgment."
-Ralph Marston-

"So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist."
-T. S. Eliot-

"To see what is right and not do it is cowardice."
-Confucius-

"Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions."
-Earl Gray Stevens-

"Evil is not an abstract concept. It lives. It has a human form. It stalks. It is too real."
-Anonymous-

"Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet."
-Roger Miller-

"In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either."
-Mark Twain-

"What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"
-Shakespeare-

"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before."
-Mae West-

"Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness."
-James Thurber-

"The great mind knows the power of gentleness."
-Robert Browning-

"To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self."
-Hamilton Mabie-

"Give sorrow words."
-Shakespeare-

"In the beginners' mind there are many possibilities;
In the experts' mind there are few."
-Shunryu Suzuki-

"Man cannot live by bread alone. He must have peanut butter."
-Brother Dave Gardner-

"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future."
-Solzhenitsyn-

"All miseries derive from not being able to sit quitely in a room alone."
-Pascal-

"Hope and fear cannot alter the season."
-Chogyam Trungpa-

"Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

"They that know no evil will suspect none."
-Ben Jonson-

"All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found the last bug."
-Frederick Brooks, Jr.-

"Destiny is not a matter of chance but of choice. Not something to wish for but to attain."
-William Jennings Bryan-

"A school should not be a preparation for life. It should be life."
-Elbert Hubbard-

"Don't ask for a light load, but rather ask for a strong back."
-Unknown-

"There are times when a man should be content with what he has but never with what he is."
-William George Jordan-

"The forces of good and evil are working within and around me, I must choose, and in a free will universe I do have a choice."
-Anonymous-

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
-Buddha-

"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
-John Gardner-

"Only a fool knows everything. A wise man knows how little he knows."
-Unknown-

"Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature."
-Albert Einstein-

"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."
-D. H. Lawrence-

"There is no object that we see; no action that we do; no good that we enjoy; no evil that we feel, or fear, but we may make some spiritual advantage of all: and he that makes such improvement is wise, as well as pious."
-Anne Bradstreet-

"A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking being done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
-Thucydides-

"Seek the wisdom of the ages, but look at the world through the eyes of a child."
-Ron Wild-