• "Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. "

~ Rabindranath Tagore

• While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men--a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what it was that the man wanted--not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted--and what it was that the man feared, really feared.

- Robert Caro, Lyndon Johnson

• Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

- G.K. Chesterton

• Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

- Tennessee Williams

• Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

- Tennessee Williams

• Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

- Tennessee Williams

• There's a line in the picture where he snarls, "Nobody tells me what to do." That's exactly how I've felt all my life.

- Marlon Brando, Portraits and Film Stills 1946-1995 (1996) Speaking about the film The Wild One (1953).

• I don't see anybody as evil. When you start seeing people as evil, you're in trouble. The thing that's going to save us is understanding. The inspection of the mind of Eichmann [Adolf Eichmann] or Himmler [Heinrich Himmler] . . . Just to dispense with them as evil is not enough, because it doesn't bring you understanding. You have to see them for what they are. You have to examine John Wayne. He's not a bad person. Who among us is going to say he's a bad man? He feels justified for what he does. The damage that he does he doesn't consider damage, he thinks it's an honest presentation of the facts.

- Marlon Brando

• Food has always been my friend. When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the icebox.

- Marlon Brando

• I think Robert F. Kennedy really, finally, cared; he realized that all of the rhetoric had to be put down into some form of action. That's perhaps the reason they killed him. They don't care what you say, you can say as much as you want to, provided you don't do anything. If you start to do something and your shuffling raises too much dust, they will disestablish you. That's what happened to Martin Luther King.

- Marlon Brando

• George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.

- Marlon Brando

• People will like you who never met you, they think you're absolutely wonderful; and then people also will hate you, for reasons that have nothing to do with any real experience with you. People don't want to lose their enemies. We have favorite enemies, people we love to hate and we hate to love. If they do something good, we don't like it. I found myself doing that with Ronald Reagan. He is anathema to me. If he does something that's reasonable, I find my mind trying to find some way to interpret it so that it's not reasonable, so that somewhere it's jingoist extremism.

- Marlon Brando

• Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don't know anything about it. They don't want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby.

- Marlon Brando

• If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.

- Emile Zola

• Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

- James Joyce

• If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.

- Benjamin Franklin

• The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

- Anaïs Nin

• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

- Henry David Thoreau

• “If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?”

- Henry Shearer

• Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?

- Maurice Freehill

• A ship in harbor is safe - but that is not what ships are for.

- John A. Shedd

• It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny.

- Napoleon Bonaparte

• One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.

- Chinese Proverb

• There is no balance, all or nothing.

- David Choe

• “Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get–only with what you are expecting to give–which is everything.”

- Katherine Hepburn

• “Be yourself. The world worships the original.”

- Ingrid Bergman

• Fear is also a street / And among its trembling stones / Tenderness somehow is able / To march with four feet / And four lips

- Pablo Neruda, 'Integrations'

• Only those who do not move do not die, but are they not already dead?

- Jean Behra

• There is no balance - all or nothing.

- David Choe

• You’re good about not giving advice; you just live, and let me watch.

- David Foster Wallace

• “Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.”

- Gregory Corso