Our dangerous class is not at the bottom; it is near the top of society. Riches without law are more dangerous than is poverty without law.
—Henry Ward Beecher
All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.
—Spike Milligan
And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again.… Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.
—Anne Lamott
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
—John Keats
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
—Mark Twain
We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
—Lewis Thomas
True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.
—Pema Chödrön
It’s as though we have two selves or two natures or two wills with two contrary viewpoints.… Your lower self sees you as the center of the universe—your higher self sees you as a cell in the body of humanity.
—Peace Pilgrim
What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.
—Henny Youngman
He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.
—Samuel Butler
You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
—Anne Lamott
There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.
—Oscar Wilde
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
—Anaïs Nin
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.
—John Ciardi
If art can reveal the truth, art can also lie. An artist can be not only divinely inspired, but diabolically inspired.
—George Bernard Shaw