The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. (Emile Zola)

When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. (Robert Pirsig)

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. (Galileo Galilei)

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. (Auric Goldfinger, in Goldfinger by Ian L. Fleming)

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. (Umberto Eco)

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. (Paul Erdos)

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. (Ayn Rand)

Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. (Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower)