I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one’s weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can’t all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something. -Arthur Conan Doyle

The government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. -Lydia Maria Child

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. -Alexander Graham Bell

I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few. -William Morris

The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. -Vincent Van Gogh

If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages. -Isak Dinesen

Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone. -Miller Williams

But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity. -Andrew Marvell

You can sometimes count every orange on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange. -A.K. Ramanujan

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. -Penelope Lively