“My friend, the pleasures to which we are not accustomed oppress us more than the griefs with which we are familiar.”

“There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please — that is as they please or displease us.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

“We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“God understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

“I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves…”

Eve Ensler (1953) American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

“Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

“It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

“Thus the more readily we accept grief, the deeper in us the awakening of the love which is not attachment but a positive serenity, pure and full of faith, the infinite in a loving act, even though in bitterness and tears.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

“Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father and how familiar His face is to us.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints