One Person

Still, it's nice to have one person who knows all your secrets.
--Chuck Palahniuk

Terrible Risk

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
--Carolyn Heilbrun

Fading Out

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
--George Orwell

Slowly

Hasten slowly.
--Zen expression

Continual

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
--James Madison

Governed

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
--G. K. Chesterton

Some Victory

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
--Horace Mann

Dependent

The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.
--Theodore Roosevelt

Barely Register

The rest of the periodic table, Elements 3 through 118, lithium through ununoctium, barely register on a cosmic scale. The rest of the universe, you and I included, is a rounding error.
--Sam Kean

Crucial

It is crucial in any loving relationship that the partners know when to leave each other alone without having to fill out a privacy application. Don't ask, don't tell. Just go in the room and close the door. So long, see you later.
--Garrison Keillor

Insincerity

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
--George Orwell

Excess

Moderation is a fatal thing: nothing succeeds like excess.
--Oscar Wilde

Friendships

Friendships follow a rhythm that is distinct from that of either consumer or entrepreneurial relationships. This is at once their deepest and most fragile characteristic.
--Todd May

A Field

Outside ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field....I'll meet you there.
--Rumi

A Wake

I like to think that most people who got caught up in that bellicose hysteria experienced the attacks as a spectatorial event, as unreal, and so their reaction was also unreal--like the "payback-time" montage in an action film or the impotent revenge scenarios we play out in our heads. It wasn't until I actually went to New York City a week after the attacks that I understood how empty and inappropriate an emotion anger was to bring to the circumstances; it was like picking fights at a wake.
--Tim Kreider

No God

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.
--Thomas Jefferson

Worship Something

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping we are becoming.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Opposite Direction

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost.
--Franz Kafka

For Others

One of the deepest secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
--Lewis Carroll

The Process

Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Empathy

As we grow up we are supposed to learn something the right derides called "empathy." Empathy is basically an expanded sense of self. It recognizes that because what happens to you affects me and mine, that you and your interests are my concern. If you fail, in the long run, I fail. If I help you succeed, in the long run I will benefit by it.
--J.N. Dillard