Mark Twain

"Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other."

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

"Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident."

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man."

"The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for."

"I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."

"I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear."

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."

"Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else."

"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce."

"Its not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog."

"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain."

"I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!"

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."

Mark Twain

Mark Twain

"Don’t go around thinking the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

Mark Twain

Caroll Hermann

Spieel

Wanneer jou drome, soos
n spieel stukkend
val
En fragmente van jou
lewe
soos skerwe voor jou voete
lê.
En Hoop,
Geloof,
(en liefde)
bloed belope terug weerkaats -
stuk vir stuk
n legkaart maak.
Kort n n stuk.
En ek soek,
ek soek.

Caroll Hermann

George Eliot

"A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of their heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away".

Aristotle

"Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way - that is not easy."

Aristotle

Cornellia Funke

"Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before."

Cornellia Funke

Scott Westerfeld

"Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart."

Scott Westerfeld

Stephenie Meyer

"I can't live in a world where you don't exist."

Stephenie Meyer

Winston S. Churchill

"If you are going through hell, keep going."

Winston S. Churchill

Plato

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song."

Plato

J.K. Rowling

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default."

J.K. Rowling

A.S. Byatt

" There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been."

A.S. Byatt

George Washington

"The turning points of lives are not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved."

George Washington

Sarah Dunn (Secrets to Happiness: A Novel)

"She never got a chance to fall out of love, to do it properly, slowly and thoroughly, and the result was he was like a phantom limb. Gone but still there. And like a true phantom limb, the preponderance of feelings associated with him were painful.

Sarah Dunn (Secrets to Happiness: A Novel)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

John Irving

"The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses."

John Irving

Stephenie Meyer

"Happy and sad, elated and miserable, secure and afraid, loved and denied, patient and angry, peaceful and wild, complete and empty...all of it. I would feel everything. It would all be mine."

Stephenie Meyer

Jeff Lindsay

"In my life long study of human beings, I have found that no matter how hard they try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workday lives of meaningless toll and suffering."

Jeff Lindsay

Steven Wright

"Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7 of your life."

Steven Wright

Jonathan Safran Foer

"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the mid afternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."

Jonathan Safran Foer