Imprescindible Quotes & Sayings

The pursuit of PhD is enduring daring adventure. — Lailah Gifty Akita

We have power ... Our power isn't in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems ... they have power ... but it's not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings. — John Trudell

The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections. — Edward Hirsch

I know it was harder for me taking care of my dad during his cancer than it was going through my own. You feel more helpless as a caregiver. — Mindy Sterling

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not. — Christopher Hitchens

The world was full of death, full of sadness, full of people, full of people too broken to lean on. — Ann Brashares

Mutual forgiveness of each vice. Such are the Gates of Paradise. — William Blake

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents. — William Barrett

As a child he had often thought of killing himself, but those were sentimental reveries born a wish to punish his father and mother and other enemies. — Truman Capote

War is always a professional enterprise; despair is left to amateurs. — Hans Koning

Outer beauty will take you miles;
inner beauty will take you around the world. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. — Bryan Stevenson

He was always doing that these days. Everything he saw became a symbol of his own existence, from a rabbit caught in headlights to raindrops racing down a window-pane. Perhaps it was a sign that he was going to become a poet or a philosopher: the kind of person who, when he stood on the sea-shore, didn't see waves breaking on a beach, but saw the surge of human will or the rhythms of copulation, who didn't hear the sound of the tide but heard the eroding roar of time and the last moaning sigh of humanity fizzing into nothingness. But perhaps it was a sign, he also thought, that he was turning into a pretentious wanker. — Stephen Fry

There's something about Betty, like she's a great big empty space waiting to suck in trouble. There'll always be a story.... One of these days Betty's going to get up and find a line of starving Africans outside her door. You can depend on it. — Laurie Graham