Searching for the secret to life? Others have been looking, too, and here's what they've found.
"To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it." -- G. K. Chesterton
"It's only money. It can buy a bed, but not sleep; it can buy food, but not an appetite; it can buy a house, but not a home." -- Anonymous
"Successful businessmen are not the smartest people in the world. I believe if you really were a genius, you'd be too sensitive to put up with what you have to put up with to win in business. It hurts too much." -- H. Ross Perot
"My mother used to say to me, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me." -- Mary Chase ("Harvey")
"The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. . . Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays."
-- E. B. White, "The Essayist"
"I don't think anybody can succeed in this business unless they just eat, sleep and drink it. You have to be focused and driven. There are too many other people out there who are, and if you're not, you're not going to get very far." -- Tim McGraw
"[It was] an unbelievable feeling [to win it all]. . .[but Division I basketball is] more like a business and more pressure than fun." -- Michelle Marciniak, point guard for the 1996 national champion Tennessee Lady Vols
"[O]ne of the things I was naive about. . .was that [first] it's a business, and then it's an art." -- Julia Louis-Dreyfus, on her three years as a cast member on "Saturday Night Live."
"When I screw up, I think, 'Geez, I've got one thing to do all day and I can't even get this right. Why did I even get out of bed?'" -- David Letterman
"I've never liked comedy when somebody can get hurt. I've never understood what's funny about the Friars roast, which is a bunch of people ripping someone to shreds." -- Eugene Levy
"We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization." -- Petronius Arbiter (circa A.D. 60)
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt." -- Cicero (63 B.C.)
"Baseball is a business, not simply a sport." -- John Montgomery Ward (1891 A.D.)
"Work fast, throw strikes, change speeds, hold 'em close." -- Ray Miller
"[We're] making rock & roll but trying to keep it interesting. It's [about] trying to do something you haven't done before that's hard to do, and worth having done when you're finished." -- Walter Becker (Steely Dan)
"...I always wanted to be special. It's like you know you have something inside you that's gonna make you different than everybody else and make you somebody in this life, but you wish you could figure out what it is, because at most things, you're either mediocre or really, really bad." -- Nellie McKay
"It's so hard for all of us to do things we don't do well. It's so hard for a man voluntarily to repeat a task where he has no artistry. He feels defeated all the time because he can't do it well. At the end of every effort, it says 'quit' - do something else that you can do more gracefully. . .I know about this. I've done it myself." -- Branch Rickey
"I have the opportunity to explore a lot of different things, and I take advantage of it. I'm not a 9-to-5 guy, but I am a 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. guy if something fascinates me." -- Tom Cousineau
"...the fuel of any creative person's passion (is) the chance to give the world a gift, and maybe even have the world notice." -- Brian Backus
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." -- Bertrand Russell
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Don't copy one person's page and call it your own; that's stealing. Instead, do what I do; learn from everybody, and call it research." -- Bob Allison
"One of the main lessons people should learn in life is that you can never tell when something happens to you whether it's ultimately going to be good or bad. It may seem bad at the time and it's really good, or it may seem good and it's really bad." -- Bill Maher
"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"