Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

- James Baldwin

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

- W.B Yeats, Easter 1916

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

- George Eliot

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move…
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

- Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses

Napoleon went forth to seek Virtue, but since she was not to be found, he got power.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

- P. G. Wodehouse, Eggs, Beans and Crumpets

Nothing is wrong with our stars. It is just that some men misread the skies.

- Dalai Lama

And as water has no constant form, there are in war no constant conditions

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

"Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!"

-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation…They cannot pay attention to anything difficult to explain, or to anything not involving division (either between nations or within the nation), or to anything that would diminish the power of politicians as a class.

-Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

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