Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
--Amadeus Mozart

"I might say to you 'Darwin was the greatest man who has ever lived,' and you might say 'No, Newton was,' but I hope we would not prolong the argument. The point is that no conclusion of substance would be affected whichever way our argument was resolved. The facts of the lives and achievements of Newton and Darwin remain totally unchanged whether we label them 'great' or not. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools of our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world."

--Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.

--Barbara Bloom