The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

I am persuaded that if any attempt is made to improve the education of the poor and such an unmanly spirit should guide the resolution of a society or committee for that purpose it would render the design abortive.

As the fly bangs against the window attempting freedom while the door stands open so we bang against death ignoring heaven.

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death and to deny one is to deny the other.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.

Values are principles and ideas that bring meaning to the seemingly mundane experience of life. A meaningful life that ultimately brings happiness and pride requires you to respond to temptations as well as challenges with honor dignity and courage.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength strength and courage to yield to.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

My friend and I sang an a cappella rendition of Extreme's 'More Than Words' at one of our football pep rallies in a desperate attempt to look cool. For a while I wore pink Converse All Stars because I thought it made me seem daring and irreverent.

As tempting as it seems to wear tennis shoes with your tux don't do it. I think it looks ridiculous. If you're 14 years old maybe give it a shot. In general don't portray anything that says 'I'm too cool and I don't care.'

Eventually I believe current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

The waste of capital in proportion to the total capital in this country between 1800 and 1850 in the attempts which were made to establish means of communication and transportation was enormous.

Mass communication radio and especially television have attempted not without success to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Let us take things as we find them: let us not attempt to distort them into what they are not... We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must use them.

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race has been labeled Utopian.

I have mentally overcome situations most of you would be terrified to ever attempt: heights fire needles spiders snakes angry monkeys being shot being hit by a car going blind - you name it I have been in a situation where I have had to mentally overcome my inherent fears to do my job.

I borrowed my friend's car the other day in an attempt to persuade my husband that we needed a car and literally this is true in the first day of borrowing the car I got three tickets and I rear-ended it.

There is small risk a general will be regarded with contempt by those he leads if whatever he may have to preach he shows himself best able to perform.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract to express it in the most general terms to find some universal formula for it.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City as they call it - London the people of the south.

Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist in love with art smitten with art history. You're also a woman with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.