Nothing ruins a face so fast as double-dealing. Your face telling one story to the world. Your heart yanking your face to pieces, trying to let the truth be known. 

~ Jessamyn West, novelist (1902-1984)

When money speaks, the truth keeps silent. 

~ Russian proverb

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences. 

~ Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)

His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it. 

~ Lois McMaster Bujold, writer (b. 1949)

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true. 

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. 

~ Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent. 

~ Horace Walpole, novelist and essayist (1717-1797)

In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs. 

~ Daniel J Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004)

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. 

~ Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. 

~ Jerome K. Jerome, humorist and playwright (1859-1927)

The sense of wishing to be known only for what one really is is like putting on an old, easy, comfortable garment. You are no longer afraid of anybody or anything. You say to yourself, 'Here I am --- just so ugly, dull, poor, beautiful, rich, interesting, amusing, ridiculous -- take me or leave me.' And how absolutely beautiful it is to be doing only what lies within your own capabilities and is part of your own nature. It is like a great burden rolled off a man's back when he comes to want to appear nothing that he is not, to take out of life only what is truly his own. 

~ David Grayson, journalist and author (1870-1946)

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. 

~ Virginia Woolf, writer (1882-1941)

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. 

~ Richard Dawkins, biologist and author (b. 1941)

Truth never damages a cause that is just. 

~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation. 

~ Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

We all have to rise in the end, not just one or two who were smart enough, had will enough for their own salvation, but all the halt, the maimed and the blind of us which is most of us. 

~ Maureen Duffy, poet, playwright, and novelist (b. 1933)

Be humble for you are made of Earth. Be noble for you are made of stars. 

~ Serbian proverb 

Today is a new day. Hiding from your history only shackles you to it. We can't undo a single thing we have ever done, but we can make decisions today that propel us to the life we want and towards the healing we need.

~  Steve Maraboli

We saw men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike. 

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

You can't do anything with anybody's body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person -- you can do only one thing to make it dirty: kill it. Hiroshima was dirty.

~ Lenny Bruce, comedian and social critic (1925-1966)