Villains

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.
- Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907 - 1973

The tragic hero prefers death to prudence. The comedian prefers playing tricks to winning. Only the villain really plays to win.
- Mason Cooley

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
- William Shakespeare, Richard III

In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.
- Alfred Hitchcock, 1899 - 1980

In a novel a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.
- Herbert Mankiewicz, 1897 - 1953

Balzac

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, and didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
- All from Honoré de Balzac, 1799 - 1850

About: The prolific French novelist Honoré de Balzac was born at Tours, France on 20 May in 1799. Educated to practice law, by his early twenties he had written several novels under pseudonyms while working as a journalist. He bought a publishing firm and a printing company, but both failed and left him with a life-long fear of penury. At age thirty he began to write under his own name, describing in great detail the life of France of his time, writing and rewriting for fourteen to eighteen hours a day. What he styled "La Comédie humaine" (The Human Comedy), which was meant to stand beside Dante's The Divine Comedy, ended up spanning ninety novels and novellas and included over 2,000 characters.

Jumping

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
- Cynthia Heimel

When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
- David Herbert Lawrence, 1885 - 1930

Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
- David Lloyd George, 1863 - 1945

Let every man look before he leaps.
- Miguel de Cervantes, 1547 - 1616

When a Banker jumps out of a window, jump after him - that's where the money is.
- Maximilien Robespierre, 1758 - 1794

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody.
- Stanislaw Lec

Sunsets

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free.
- Aldo Leopold, 1887 - 1948

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
- Crowfoot, 1821 - 1890

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874 - 1936

Man's feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell; like the glaciers, which are transparent and rosy-hued only at sunrise and sunset, but throughout the day are gray and cold.
- Jean Paul Richter, 1763 - 1825

I don't know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.
- John Glenn

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere: the dew is never all dried at once: a shower is forever falling, vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
- John Muir, 1838 - 1914

Security

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906 - 2001

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
- Erich Fromm, 1900 - 1980

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
- Helen Keller, 1880 - 1968

Clearly, security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.
- Henry Alfred Kissinger

The only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets.
- Lysander Spooner, 1808 - 1887

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
- Oscar Wilde, 1854 - 1900

Richard Feynman

All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.

The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my eye can catch one-million-year-old light. It does no harm to the mystery to know a little about it.

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
- All from Richard Feynman, 1918 - 1988

About: Richard Phillips Feynman was born at Far Rockaway, Queens, New York on 11 May in 1918. He studied at MIT and received a doctorate for original work on quantum mechanics at Princeton in 1942. After working on atomic bomb development during the war he held the chair in theoretical physics at Cornell, and the same position at Caltech from 1951 through the rest of his career. His lectures were extremely well regarded both in and outside the opaque realm of physics, and became the basis for several books. He was called "The Great Explainer".

James Matthew Barrie

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.

Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that.
- All from James Matthew Barrie, 1860 - 1937

About: The man who wrote Peter Pan, Sir James Matthew Barrie, was born at Kirriemuir, Scotland on 9 May in 1860. After graduating from the University of Edinburg in 1882 he wrote for the Nottingham Journal for three years before he moved to London. There he thrived in an intense literary circle, his friends included H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, and P. G. Wodehouse, and wrote extensively for the stage.

Fathers' Day

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
- Anne Sexton

Society moves by some degree of parricide, by which the children, on the whole, kill, if not their fathers, at least the beliefs of their fathers, and arrive at new beliefs. This is what progress is.
- Isaiah Berlin

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma.
- Marlene Dietrich, 1901 - 1992

My best training came from my father.
- Woodrow Wilson, 1856 - 1924

Fatherhood is pretending that the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.
- Bill Cosby

Sigmund Freud

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
- All from Sigmund Freud, 1856 - 1939

About: Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born at Freiburg, now part of the Czech Republic, on 6 May in 1856. Sigmund's mother was twenty years younger than his father, younger than his step-brother, and Sigmund was an uncle on the day he was born. Spurned by a young lady at age 16, he reserved his affections for his mother for ten years. It's no wonder that he spent his life trying to analyze the lives and loves of his patients, also no wonder that his work attracted such controversy. Fortunately, at least some of what he had to say makes sense.

Odds

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race [is] not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
- Ecclesiastes 9:11

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

Never let the odds keep you from pursuing what you know in your heart you were meant to do.
- Leroy "Satchel" Paige, 1906 - 1982

The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.
- Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1899 - 1977

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?
- Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, 1800 - 1859

Wonder

The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all art and science. So to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
- Albert Einstein, 1879 - 1955

Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.
- Bette Davis, 1908 - 1989

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
- Greek proverb

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
- Helen Keller, 1880 - 1968

A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.
- Lord Dunsany, The Laughter of the Gods

Where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
- Rabindranath Tagore, 1861 - 1941

Smells

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books.
- Andre Sinyavsky

The smell of rain is rich with life.
- Estela Portillo Trambley

Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text.
- James Lovelock

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little.
- Rachel Louise Carson, 1907 - 1964

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
- W. Somerset Maugham, 1874 - 1965

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
- Henry Louis Mencken, 1880 - 1956

Dr Spock

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse.

In our country today, very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country, or God.

Don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
- All from Benjamin McLane Spock, 1903 - 1998

About: Benjamin McLane Spock was born at New Haven, Connecticut on 2 May in 1903. After a strict and somewhat bizarre childhood he studied medicine, and in 1946 wrote The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care which became, for better or worse, the operating manual for a whole generation of children. (Including yours truly.) While at Yale he rowed competitively, including winning a Gold in the 1924 Summer Olympics in an "eight". He came under attack for his politics in the 'seventies, he was against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam war, in favor of civil and women's rights, and ran for president in 1972.

Mail

I have made this a rather long letter because I haven't had time to make it shorter.
- Blaise Pascal, 1623 - 1662

Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.
- Josh Billings, 1818 - 1885

If you want to discover your true opinion of anybody, observe the impression made on you by the first sight of a letter from him.
- Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860

Letters are expectation packed in an envelope.
- Shana Alexander

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.
- William Butler Yeats, 1865 - 1939

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
- Ernest Rutherford, 1871 - 1937

Marcus Aurelius

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

Let thy chief fort and place of defense be a mind free from passions. A stronger place and better fortified than this, hath no man.

No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it then with a continuous series of such thoughts as these: for instance, that where a man can live, there he can also live well.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.

That which is not good for the hive is not good for the bee.
- All from Marcus Aurelius, 121 - 180

About: Marcus Annius Verus was born to Spanish parents at Rome on 26 Apr in 121. He was a serious and studious child and came to the attention of the emperor Hadrian. Hadrian adopted Antoninus, who in turn adopted Marcus, establishing the succession. At this time he was called Aurelius, the golden one. During Antoninus' peaceful reign, Aurelius was a diligent administrator, a priest in the state religion, and a stoic philosopher. During this time he wrote "The Meditations" in Greek, most quotes that survive are from that volume. When he came to power himself, the empire was under attack first by Parthia, then smallpox, and then by Germanic tribes, and Aurelius spent most of his reign in the field commanding his troops and provided us with few quotes. And if you are wondering, yes he was the 'Gladiator'!

http://www.murphsplace.com/gladiator/marcus.html

http://www.exovedate.com/the_real_gladiator_one.html