— John Ruskin
"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.... We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.... The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.... Youth is wasted on the young.... I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.... People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.... A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
— George Bernard Shaw
"May you live all the days of your life."
— Jonathan Swift
"When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.... It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.... Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."
— Jonathan Swift
"The corporate system is set up to favor those with steel elbows."
— Elena Herdieckerhoff
"You're on earth. There's no cure for that."
— Samuel Beckett
"I have no yesterdays, time took them away; tomorrow may not be, but I have today."
— Pearl Yeadon McGinnis
"I have four things to learn in life: to think clearly without hurry or confusion; to love everybody sincerely; to act in everything with the highest motives; to trust in God unhesitatingly."
— Helen Keller
"I said, 'Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?' And Joe said, 'I’ve got something he'll never have.' And I said, 'What on earth could that be, Joe?' And Joe said, “Enough.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut, recalling a conversation he had with Joseph Heller at a party hosted by a billionaire
— Kurt Vonnegut
— Joseph Heller
"Humans will always choose what they understand over what they do not."
— Dr. Robert Ford, fictional character in Westworld
"School's a piece of cake compared to life, man."
— Papa Mike
"We need dark in order to show light."
— Bob Ross, painter, creator of The Joy of Painting
"Of course I'm not Shakespeare or Hegel; but I have written works that I've polished as carefully as I could, and some have been failures, surely, but others less so, while still others have been successes. And that's enough."
— Jean-Paul Sartre
"Sartre had taught me to think in the present as if yesterday's thoughts did not count: they would come back if they were still needed."
— Benny Levy
"(Joaquin Phoenix and I) were talking on the first day about the fact I had never done a serious scene in a movie, and he asked, 'Well, are you nervous?' I said, 'Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing!' And he said, 'Do you think that any of us ever know what we're doing?' He may have just been saying that to make me feel better, but if he was saying it in earnest, it's kind of a clue as to why he's so good. If someone really is approaching their work as though it's the first time they've ever done it, then that is an incredible sort of openness and lack of complacency. It's such an alive place to be working from."
— Joanna Newsom
"Everybody treats me like an old man. I laugh about it. Why? Because an old man never feels like an old man. The attitude of other people makes me understand what old age means to the person who looks at it from outside, but I don't feel my old age. So to be old doesn't in itself teach my anything. What does teach me something is the attitude of other people toward me. In other words, the fact that for others I am old is to be profoundly old. Old age is a reality that is mine but that others feel..."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, 1980 (so he was 75 years old)
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm."
— Aldous Huxley
"Then (my father) told my sister Mary and me that he was going to prepare us to fight the battle of life by giving us an education, which he and our mother had not had."
— Anson Mills
"My family shaped me almost entirely. I'm my mother's son, and she had a vision of what I should be capable of. She provided the means to nurture whatever it was that would become my actualized self. My grandfather was the closest thing I had to a father growing up; he was enormously inspirational. He is in some ways a small-town, country-days man - a touch-stone of masculinity and humor and selflessness. He was all man to me. There was a deeper level of discovery that came the moment my son's head crowned at birth. My children have taught me as much as I've tried to teach them. My daughter, particularly, has taught me a new level of appreciation for what it is to be female, what it is to be a woman, and about my relationship to femininity and women."
— Jeffrey Wright, actor
"Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it."
— Kurt Vonnegut
"... it is sometimes wise courageously to defy and disobey injurious and useless commands. Such actions often injure the reputation of the reformer for a time, but eventually they will distinguish him above the larger number of his fellows..."
— Anson Mills
"Few things break us out of our routines and awaken us to the living substance of happiness more powerfully than travel."
— Maria Popova
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