"For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive."

“The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset nature on our behalf.”

“The function of the wing is to take what is heavy and raise it up in the region above.”

“Writers are funny about reviews: when they get a good one they ignore it-- but when they get a bad review they never forget it. Every writer I know is the same way: you get a hundred good reviews, and one bad, andyou remember only the bad. For years, you go on and fantasize about the reviewer who didn't like your book; you imagine him as a jerk, a wife-beater, a real ogre. And, in the meantime, the reviewer has forgotten all about the whole thing. But, twenty years later, the writer still remembers that one bad review.”

“My father always said: 'If you want to know someone, live together on a boat.'”

“Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering 'it will be happier'...”

Source : "The Foresters, Robin Hood and Maid Marian". Play by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1892.

“Let peace, descending from her native heaven, bid her olives spring amidst the joyful nations; and plenty, in league with commerce, scatter blessings from her copious hand!”

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

“Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.”

Source : Joe Abercrombie (2009). “Last Argument Of Kings: The First Law: Book Three”, p.436, Hachette UK