Men would like to learn to love themselves, but they usually find they cannot. That is because they have built an ideal image of themselves which puts their real self in the shade.

GERALD BRENAN

We do not know whether it is good to live or to die. Therefore, we should not take delight in living nor should we tremble at the thought of death. We should be equiminded towards both. This is the ideal.

MAHATMA GANDHI

The "what should be" never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no "what should be," there is only what is.

LENNY BRUCE

It doesn't matter who gives them as long as you never wear anything second-rate. Wait for the first-class jewels, Gigi. Hold on to your ideals.

COLETTE

Men would like to love themselves but they usually find that they cannot. That is because they have built an ideal image of themselves which puts their real self in the shade.

GERALD BRENAN

Castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up.

BARON LYTTON

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

SOMERSET MAUGHAM

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

H. L. MENCKEN

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power . . . imagination.

SAMUEL COLERIDGE

Don't use that foreign word "ideals." We have that excellent native word "lies."

HENRIK IBSEN

What we need most, is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real.

H. F. HEDGE

The true ideal is not opposed to the real, but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

To hate and to fear is to be psychologically ill. It is, in fact, the consuming illness of our time.

H. A. OVERSTREET

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

THOMAS MANN

The more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your resources—spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical.

NORMAN COUSINS

If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.

ABRAHAM MASLOW

It's been troubling me. Now, why is it that most of us can talk openly about the illnesses of our bodies, but when it comes to our brain and illnesses of the mind we clam up and because we clam up, people with emotional disorders feel ashamed, stigmatized and don't seek the help that can make the difference.

KIRK DOUGLAS

The past few years have seen a steady increase in the number of people playing music in the streets. The past few years have also seen a steady increase in the number of malignant diseases. Are these two facts related?

FRAN LEBOWITZ

A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.

HIPPOCRATES

We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.

DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

OSCAR WILDE

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

BROOKS ATKINSON

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

GORE VIDAL

Never lose in your imagination. Never. Never. Never. Never.

WINSTON CHURCHILL paraphrased

To be one's self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.

IRVING WALLACE

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen, whether it be a political thing, or a social thing or a work of art.

SEAN O'FAOLAIN

We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.

WOODROW WILSON

Love doesn't grow on the trees like apples in Eden—it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination to make it too, just like anything else.

JOYCE CARY

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

CARL JUNG

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

MACAULAY on John Dryden

The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream—he awoke and found it truth.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

"Let's go." "Yes, let's go." STAGE DIRECTION: They do not move.

LAST LINES OF WAITING FOR GODOT SAMUEL BECKETT

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around wondering about yourself.

KATHARINE HEPBURN

Why should we take up farming when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?

AFRICAN BUSHMAN

Help! I'm being held prisoner by my heredity and environment!

DENNIS ALLEN

He not busy being born is busy dying.

BOB DYLAN

There are hazards in anything one does, but there are greater hazards in doing nothing.

SHIRLEY WILLIAMS

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

WILL ROGERS

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? "Margo, don't be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep."

MARGO KAUFMAN

There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing over their individualities to others. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest within your soul and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary man-made rules that are not founded on principle.

RALPH WALDO TRINE

As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.

GOLDA MEIR

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.

COCO CHANEL

Who is it that says most? Which can say more than this rich praise—that you alone are you?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Why is it no one ever sent me yet one perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get one perfect rose.

DOROTHY PARKER

Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT

I hate ingratitude more in a man Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, Or any taint of vice whose strong corruption Inhabits our frail blood.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE TWELFTH NIGHT

Have I ever told you you're my hero? You're everything I would like to be. I can climb higher than an eagle. You are the wind beneath my wings.

LARRY HENLEY

JEFF SILBAR

The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY

I wish I was Donna Reed—she'd have something wonderful to say. Or Shirley Jones—she'd have something wonderful to say, too, and maybe even some fresh—baked cookies. Or Loretta Young; of course, she wouldn't have anything wonderful to say, but she would make a stunning entrance.

JESSICA TATE

Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.

DON MARQUIS

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

Anybody who sees and paints a sky green and pastures blue ought to be sterilized.

ADOLF HILTER

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of an eye, the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

We look at it and do not see it; Its name is The Invisible. We listen to it and do not hear it; Its name is The Inaudible. We touch it and do not find it; Its name is The Formless.

LAO-TZU

The power of the visible is the invisible.

MARIANNE MOORE