Walt Disney

Always remember that this whole thing was started by a mouse.

All we ever intended for him or expected of him was that he should continue to make people everywhere chuckle with him and at him...

Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.

A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there.

We don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public.

Courage is the main quality of leadership, in my opinion, no matter where it is exercised. Usually it implies some risk — especially in new undertakings.

All right. I'm corny. But I think there's just about a-hundred-and-forty-million people in this country that are just as corny as I am.

The human species, although happily ridiculous at times, is still reaching for the stars.

Faith I have, in myself, in humanity, in the worthwhileness of the pursuits in entertainment for the masses. But wide awake, not blind faith, moves me.

Katherine Anne Porter

Love is a state in which one lives who loves, and whoever loves has given himself away; love then, and not marriage, is belonging.

In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.

You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

Anarchy had been here all the nineteenth century, with its sinister offspring Nihilism, and it is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world.

There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgment has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder.

They left a great heritage of love, devotion, faith, and courage — all done with the sure intention that holy Anarchy should be glorified through their sacrifice and that the time would come that no human being should be humiliated or be made abject.

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own — even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled . . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.

Dorothy Parker

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

Excuse my dust.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.

One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.

 Razors pain you,

 Rivers are damp,

Acids stain you,

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful,

Nooses give,

Gas smells awful.

You might as well live.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.

The poems I am writing at the moment will be much closer to your present way of thinking. I am trying to renew poetic style, but within a classical framework. On the other hand, I don't want to lapse into imitating others. (Letter to Picasso)

At last you're tired of this elderly world
Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
You're fed up living with antiquity

And love runs down like this
Water, love runs down.
How slow life is,
How violent hope is.

Nor days nor any time detain.
Time past or any love
Cannot come again.

O pretty ship, my memory
Isn't this far enough to sea,
And the sea not fit to drink?
Haven't we drifted far and lost
From fair dawn to dreary dusk?

Alexandre Dumas

Nothing succeeds like success.

Sleeping on a plank has one advantage - it encourages early rising.

Private misfortunes must never induce us to neglect public affairs.

Drunk, if you like; so much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.

There is ... a clever maxim which bears upon what I was saying to you some little while ago, and that is, that unless wicked ideas take root in a naturally depraved mind, human nature, in a right and wholesome state, revolts at crime. Still, from an artificial civilisation have originated wants, vices, and false tastes, which occasionally become so powerful as to stifle within us all good feelings, and ultimately to lead us into guilt and wickedness...

You are young, and your bitter recollections have time to change themselves into sweet remembrances.

 All for one, one for all, that is our motto.

"Weep," said Athos, "weep, heart full of love, youth, and life! Alas, would I could weep like you!"

All human wisdom is contained in these words: Wait and hope!

John Milton

A poet soaring in the high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam.

Men of most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.

No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free.

I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.

Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war.

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless.

Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?

J. K. Rowling

Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!

The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry…

I think that it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.

The wizards represent all that the true "muggle" most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!

They see it for what it is... It is a fantasy world and they understand that completely.

The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think it's one of the reasons that some people don't like the books, but I think that it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.

No story lives unless someone wants to listen.

Those who chose not to empathize enable real monsters; for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?

Was none who would be foremost
To lead such dire attack;
But those behind cried, "Forward!"
And those before cried, "Back!"

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science — the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter — should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.

Robert Penn Warren

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.

The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that...

But to poetry — You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying.

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.

In silence the heart raves. It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning. 

The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.

Wallace Stevens

One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;