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Follow a shadow, it still flies you; Seem to fly it, it will pursue: So court a mistress, she denies you; Let her alone, she will court you.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

A word is dead when it is said. Some say. I say it just, begins to live that day.

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

If you want to be happy, be.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator the smaller the fraction.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then we live with that decision.

For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.