The sick do not ask if the hand that smooths their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin. 

~ Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could. 

~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life -- the sick, the needy and the handicapped. 

~ Hubert Horatio Humphrey, US Vice President (1911-1978)

Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body. 

~ Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)

The worst kind of people are those who confuse kindness for weakness. 

~ Werner Makowski, banker (b. 1929)

Where the light is brightest, the shadows are deepest. 

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)

I think that to get under the surface and really appreciate the beauty of a country, one has to go there poor. 

~ Grace Moore, actress and singer (1898-1947)

The late F.W.H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."

~ Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970) 

Nature never said to me: Do not be poor. Still less did she say: Be rich. Her cry to me was always: Be independent. 

~ Nicolas de Chamfort, writer (1741-1794)

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. 

~ Jean Baudrillard, sociologist and philosopher (1929-2007)

What is the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on. 

 ~ Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle. 

~ Freya Stark, explorer and writer (1893-1993)

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. 

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)

Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second. 

~ Bernard Berenson, art historian (1865-1959)

Who knows what Columbus would have discovered if America hadn't got in the way. 

 ~ Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. 

~ Henry Adams, historian and teacher (1838-1918) 

In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away. 
~ T.S. Eliot, poet (1888-1965)

I wish I could have known earlier that you have all the time you'll need right up to the day you die. 
~ William Wiley, artist (b. 1937)

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. 

~ Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned. 

~ Heinrich Heine, poet, journalist, and essayist (1797-1856)

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when you were not: that gives us no concern. Why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? To die is only to be as we were before we were born. 

 ~ William Hazlitt, essayist (1778-1830)

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. 

 ~ Susan Ertz, author (1894-1985)