All love that has not friendship for its base is like a mansion built upon the sand.

~Ella Wheeler Wilcox
(on a Celestial Seasonings tea bag)

What is grace? It is the inspiration from on high: it is love; it is liberty. Grace is the spirit of law. This discovery of the spirit of law belongs to St. Paul; and what he calls "grace" from a heavenly point of view, we from an earthly point, call "righteousness."

~Victor Hugo,
author of Les Misérables

You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.

~Louisa May Alcott,
author of Little Women

There are many fine ideals which ware not realisable, and yet we do not refrain from teaching them.

~Peretz Smolenskin

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.

~Aristotle

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

~Elie Wiesel,
author of Night

Hope

When we understand that life is a series of passages and each has helped us to become more than we were before, then the changes we must endure and the mountains we must climb become easier to face. When we begin to define what is most precious to us, when we find the courage to follow our own path and make a conscious choice to see through the eyes of hope, this when our life's purpose is revealed.

~Flavia Weedn, 2002

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

~Samuel Butler (1612-80),
English Poet & Author

Truth hath a quiet breast.

~Shakespeare, King Richard II