“What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?”

“What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”

David Nicholls book One Day

“What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

“The Jews should not be allowed to keep what they have obtained from others by usury; it were best that they were compelled to worked so that they could earn their living instead of doing nothing but becoming avaricious.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

“If life, liberty, and property could be enjoyed in as great perfection in solitude as in society, there would be no need of government.”

James Otis Jr. (1725–1783) Lawyer in colonial Massachusetts

“6384. He that would please all, and himself too,
Undertakes what none could ever do.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

“Little Billy’s mother was always telling him exactly what he was allowed to do and what he was not allowed to do. All the things he was allowed to do were boring. All the things he was not allowed to do were exciting. One of the things he NEVER NEVER was allowed to do, the most exciting of them all, was to go out through the garden gate all by himself and explore the world beyond.”

Roald Dahl book The Minpins

“Why not give up the pain, the injury, the slow and terminal? He worried and fretted how cool his skin had become. He understood how at the end a freezing man felt alive with heat and a drowned man could breathe and a burning man became cold and shivered and then died.”

Robert Olmstead (1954) American writer

“This man talked like he could build the barns by himself, like he could till the soil by himself. And he failed to realize that wealth is always a result of the commonwealth.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement