Jules Verne

We cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

Man is never perfect, nor contented.

Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best.

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.

Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word "impossible" is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise. Between Barbicane's proposition and its realization no true Yankee would have allowed even the semblance of a difficulty to be possible. A thing with them is no sooner said than done. (Ha! Ha! Ha!--From the Earth to the Moon, 1865)

Cormac McCarthy

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.

Winston Churchill

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

History is written by the victors.

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

Lucretius

Life is one long struggle in the dark.

Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion.

Thus the sum of things is ever being reviewed, and mortals dependent one upon another. Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners pass on the torch of life.

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.

What is food to one man is bitter poison to others.

The first beginnings of things cannot be distinguished by the eye.

But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest wealth is to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.

Miles Davis

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

For me, music and life are all about style.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

Harold Pinter

When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

There can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections.

I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.

It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.

While The United States is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, it is also the most detested nation that the world has ever known.

Ray Bradbury

We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

Paulo Coelho

Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.

The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes or other people's opinions.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.

Lewis Black

The people who told us about sun block were the same people who told us, when I was a kid, that eggs were good. So I ate a lot of eggs. Ten years later they said they were bad. I went, "Well, I just ate the eggs!" So I stopped eating eggs, and ten years later they said they were good again! Well, then I ate twice as many, and then they said they were bad. Well, now I'm really fucked! Then they said they're good, they're bad, they're good, the whites are good, th-the yellows - make up your mind! It's breakfast I've gotta eat!

All the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911.

In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in twelve years, we'll be voting for plants.

Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas.

We always feel better in anticipation. You don't think about something and think "Aw, it's gonna be shitty." NO! You say "This is gonna be the greatest weekend ever! Sonuvabitch!" And then, by Monday, you're throwing up and you're thinking "You know, I always thought those guys were pricks!"

Henri Poincare

If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.

As we can not give a general definition of energy, the principle of the conservation of energy signifies simply that there is something which remains constant.

If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of the same universe at a succeeding moment.

Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.

It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.

A scientist worthy of the name, above all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same Nature.