A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.

Mad or glad, Mr. Reagan is head over heels in love with Mrs. Reagan and can’t even imagine a world without her – He loves her.

When people get married young, you don’t really understand the true definition of marriage.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

The love of heaven makes one heavenly.

You can’t forgive without loving. And I don’t mean sentimentality. I don’t mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, ‚I forgive. I’m finished with it.‘

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Olympics for me is love, peace, united.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.

My life is my message.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

I take inspiration from everyone and everything. I’m inspired by current champions, former champions, true competitors, people dedicated to their dream, hard workers, dreamers, believers, achievers.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.

I am deeply grateful to the citizens of Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Canton assembly for bestowing upon me this incredible honor of citizenship. I am so proud to now be a part of such an extraordinary part of the world and fellow citizen to the people I deeply love and admire.

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

I always think if you are asking somebody for something it is a good idea to give them something first.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Bill Gates has always been a mentor and inspiration for me even before I knew him. Just growing up, I admired how Microsoft was mission-focused.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

We can never learn too much of His will towards us, too much of His messages and His advice. The Bible is His word and its study gives at once the foundation for our faith and an inspiration to battle onward in the fight against the tempter.

All mankind love a lover.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.

You give before you get.

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

O, had I but followed the arts!

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.