Best quotes from people born July 12

 

In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.—Emperor Julius Caesar (100 B.C.E.-44 B.C.E.)

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.—philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Look wise say nothing and grunt, speech was given to conceal thought. —physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

You push the button, we do the rest.—George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak Company (1854-1932)

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.—agricultural chemist George Washington Carver (1864-1943)

Happiness is an angel with a serious face.—painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. —engineer, philosopher, and futurist Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone, you'll never walk alone.—lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960)

Tonight I can write the saddest lines/I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.—Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.—comedian Milton Berle (1908-2002)

Bonus quote from Berle:

A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong.

Literary Bits: 10 Authors on Reading

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

 

The duty of literature is to note what counts and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.—Anatole France

 

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.—Arthur Conan Doyle

 

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.—G. K. Chesterton

 

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.—E. M. Forster

 

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.—Ezra Pound

 

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.—F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.—C. S. Lewis

 

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

 

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.—John Green, An Abundance of Katherines