“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

William Faulkner

“Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”

John D. Rockefeller

“It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.”

Louis L’Amour

From “The Walking Drum”

“The life which is unexamined is not worth living.”

Socrates

“I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.”

S.J. Perelman

“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.”

Vince Lombardi

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Ray Bradbury

Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness.

Samuel Johnson

“Christmas would be meaningless without Easter.”

Heard at a Christmas Eve Mass a few years ago