Everyone we meet is a hero waiting to happen. When Jesus saw people, He envisioned their potential. No respecter of persons, He associated with people from all walks of life.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR PRECIOUS TIME GIVING ONE SINGLE CRAP ABOUT WHAT ANYBODY ELSE THINKS OF YOU.

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. —André Gide; French author, Nobel Prize winner

The testosterone-fueled chip on my shoulder came from a high school career spent futilely awaiting a timely puberty while standing a good foot taller than everyone on earth, all the boys at my high school included. None of them ever asked me out, but I could make them laugh and kick their asses at basketball, so rather than fail at seducing them, I simply became one of them.

Once you step away from the herd and let your true self shine, you'll probably find yourself in front of the opinion firing squad (especially if what you want to do is extraordinary and outside of everyone's comfort zones), which is why so many people run screaming from the lives they'd so love to live. Merely allowing yourself to be seen is a risk.

We use celebrity "news" to perpetuate this dehumanizing view of females, focused solely on one's physical appearance, which tabloids turn into a sporting event of speculation. Is she pregnant? Is she eating too much? Has she let herself go? Is her marriage on the rocks because the camera detects some physical "imperfection"?

I judge people on how they smell, not how they look.

His features were lost in masses of shaggy hair that hung on his shoulders; and his eyes, too, were like a ghostly Catherine's, with all their beauty annihilated.

Living among clowns and misanthropists, she probably cannot appreciate a better class of people when she meets them.

A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad,' I continued, 'if you were a regular black; and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.

know so well that human nature is human nature everywhere, whether under tile or thatch, and that in every specimen of human nature that breathes, vice and virtue are ever found blended, in smaller or greater proportions, and that the proportion is not determined by station. I have seen villains who were rich, and I have seen villains who were poor, and I have seen villains who were neither rich nor poor

They do live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface change, and frivolous external things.