The above quotation is from a poem ‘First Love,’ by John Clare:

First Love

I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale.
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.

And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start –
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.

1. An optimist is a driver who thinks that empty space at the curb won’t have a hydrant beside it.

2. As I grow to understand life less and less I grow to love it more and more.

3. Don’t tell a woman she’s pretty; tell her there’s no other woman like her, and all roads will open to you.

4. Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.

5. Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.

6. It doesn’t pay to say too much when you are mad enough to choke. For the word that stings the deepest is the word that is never spoke, Let the other fellow wrangle till the storm has blown away, then he’ll do a heap of thinking about the things you didn’t say.

7. Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.

8. Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time.

9. The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world’s dreadful injustice.

10. The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

11. We are so happy to advise others that occasionally we even do it in their interest.

12. Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

13. Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.

An expert in the field of communication, Gray’s focus is to help men and women understand, respect and appreciate their differences in both personal and professional relationships. In his many books, CD’s, DVD’s, tapes, workshops and seminars, he provides simple, practical tools and insights to effectively manage stress and improve relationships at all stages and ages by creating the brain and body chemistry of health, happiness and lasting romance.

Dr. John Gray has appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, CBS Morning Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, The View, Politically Incorrect, Larry King and others. He has been profiled in Newsweek, Time, Forbes, USA Today, TV Guide and People, among scores of other major programs. He was the subject of a rare three-hour special hosted by Barbara Walters.

In addition to being a Certified Family Therapist with over 30 years of experience in the field, John Gray is a consulting editor of The Family Journal and a member of the Distinguished Advisory Board of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. He is a recipient of the coveted the Smart Marriages Impact Award.

1. A women under stress is not immediately concerned with finding solutions to her problems but rather seeks relief by expressing herself and being understood.

2. Men are motivated and empowered when they feel needed. Women are motivated and empowered when they feel cherished.

3. All men and women have an equal need for love. When these needs are not fulfilled it is easy to have our feelings hurt, for which we blame our partner.

4. To offer a man unsolicited advice is to presume that he doesn’t know what to do or that he can’t do it on his own.

5. The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again.

After appearing in vaudeville with her sisters, Garland was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. There she made more than two dozen films, including nine with Mickey Rooney and the 1939 film with which she would be most identified, The Wizard of Oz. After 15 years, Garland was released from the studio but gained renewed success through record-breaking concert appearances, including a critically acclaimed Carnegie Hall concert, a well-regarded but short-lived television series and a return to acting beginning with a critically acclaimed performance in A Star Is Born (1954).

Despite her professional triumphs, Garland battled personal problems throughout her life. Insecure about her appearance, her feelings were compounded by film executives who told her she was unattractive and overweight. Plied with drugs to control her weight and increase her productivity, Garland endured a decades-long struggle with prescription drug addiction. Garland was plagued by financial instability, often owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. She married five times, with her first four marriages ending in divorce. She also attempted suicide on a number of occasions. Garland died of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 47, leaving children Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, and Joey Luft.

1. Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.

2. Behind every cloud is another cloud.

3. How strange when an illusion dies. It’s as though you’ve lost a child.

4. I try to bring the audience’s own drama – tears and laughter they know about – to them.

5. I’ve always taken ‘The Wizard of Oz’ very seriously, you know. I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I’ve spent my entire life trying to get over it.

6. It’s lonely and cold on the top… lonely and cold.

7. There have been times when I have deliberately tried to take my life… I think I must have been crying for some attention.

8. You are never so alone as when you are ill on stage. The most nightmarish feeling in the world is suddenly to feel like throwing up in front of four thousand people.

His novel, Emile: or, On Education, which he considered his most important work, is a seminal treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, was of great importance to the development of pre-Romanticism and romanticism in fiction.

Rousseau’s autobiographical writings: his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (along with the works of Lessing and Goethe in Germany, and Richardson and Sterne in England), were among the pre-eminent examples of the late eighteenth-century movement known as the “Age of Sensibility”, featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age.

Rousseau also wrote a play and two operas, and made important contributions to music as a theorist. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophies among members of the Jacobin Club. He was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, sixteen years after his death.

Shaw was born in Lanesborough, Massachusetts, and worked as a farmer, coal miner, explorer, and auctioneer before he began making a living as a journalist and writer in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1858. Under the pseudonym “Josh Billings” he wrote in an informal voice full of the slang of the day, with often eccentric phonetic spelling, dispensing wit and folksy common-sense wisdom. His books include Farmers’ Allminax, Josh Billings’ Sayings, Everybody’s Friend, Choice Bits of American Wit and Josh Billings’ Trump Kards.

His saying, “In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money can not buy… to wit the wag of a dog’s tail” appears at the beginning of the Disney film Lady and the Tramp.

He toured, giving lectures of his writings, which were very popular with the audiences of the day.

Billings died in Monterey, California.

1. About the only difference between the poor and the rich, is this, the poor suffer misery, while the rich have to enjoy it.

2. Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight.

3. Advice is like castor oil, easy enough to give but dreadful uneasy to take.

4. As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.

5. Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.

6. Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.

7. Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.

8. Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.

9. Don’t ever prophesy; for if you prophesy wrong, nobody will forget it; and if you prophesy right, nobody will remember it.

10. Every man has his follies – and often they are the most interesting thing he has got.

11. Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain’t lawful tender for a loaf of bread.

12. I have lived in this world just long enough to look carefully the second time into things that I am most certain of the first time.

13. If a man should happen to reach perfection in this world, he would have to die immediately to enjoy himself.

14. If there was no faith there would be no living in this world. We could not even eat hash with any safety.

15. If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her own nose all the time.

16. It is a very delicate job to forgive a man, without lowering him in his own estimation, and yours too.

17. It’s not only the most difficult thing to know one’s self, but the most inconvenient.

18. Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.

19. Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.

20. Money will buy a pretty good dog, but it won’t buy the wag of his tail.

21. Most people when they come to you for advice, come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected.

22. One of rarest things that a man ever does is to do the best he can.

23. One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.

24. One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.

25. Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

26. The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.

27. The thinner the ice, the more anxious is everyone to see whether it will bear.

28. There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.

29. There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can’t tell the truth without lying.

30. There are two kinds of fools: those who can’t change their opinions and those who won’t.

31. There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.

32. When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants, and I give it to him.

He had a doctorate in civil law at the University of Madrid and a doctorate in theology at the Lateran University in Rome. He was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Theology and Consultor of the Congregation of Seminaries, and Consultor of the Pontificial Commission for the Authentic Interpretation of the Code of Canon Law.

His principal work was the foundation, government and expansion of Opus Dei. He and the organization have been accused of many things, including political involvement. However, some independent journalists, among them CNN Vatican analyst John Allen, Jr., say that these accusations are mere myths that grew from black legends propagated against Opus Dei and Escrivá. Opus Dei and Escrivá continue to be polarizing subjects among certain members of the Catholic Church. Popes and Catholic leaders strongly endorse Escriva’s teaching on the universal call to holiness, the role of laity, and sanctification of work.

1. Don’t judge without having heard both sides. Even persons who think themselves virtuous very easily forget this elementary rule of prudence.

2. You’re bored? That’s because you keep your senses awake and your soul asleep.

Conrad was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature; his narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many subsequent authors. Films have been adapted from or inspired by Conrad’s Victory, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo.

1. A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

2. A man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

3. A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

4. Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

5. Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

6. I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

7. All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

8. Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

9. I don’t like work … but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – which no other man can ever know.

10. I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.

11. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

12. The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

Most of Baldwin’s work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.

Sayings by James Baldwin:

1. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

2. Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

3. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

4. Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

5. Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.

6. Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

7. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

8. I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

9. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

10. I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

11. I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

12. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

13. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

14. If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

15. Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

16. No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

17 People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.