Nuggets of wisdom we'd all do well to internalize...
"I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape."
Estella (to Pip)
Dickens in Great Expectations
"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument."
William G. McAdoo
US Senator (CA) 1933-38
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."
Mark Twain
Innocents Abroad
"For just as with alcoholics a fresh bottle of wine becomes an excuse for drinking, so also those who are recently grown rich, and have acquired great possessions, desire more of the same, nursing the sickness with perpetual addition."
Saint Basil the Great
To the Rich
"Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love."
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
"Most People do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
Stephen Covey
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
"A wonderful fact to reflect on, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other."
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
Napoleon Bonaparte
Emperor of France
"There's a faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there's faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of God ... the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to God's mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence."
R. Scott Bakkar
The Darkness That Comes Before