People always make this totally artificial distinction between what is commercial and what is good. They quote that maxim "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the public's taste" and I think that's very wrongheaded. I like to believe the audience is actually intelligent, because it's made up of other people like yourself.
There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.
The universal line of distinction between the strong and the weak is that one persists; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at last collapses or "caves in.
There are no a priori obstacles to the scientific knowledge of the mind, but the scientific knowledge of the mind is not all the knowledge of the mind that there is. This is not an objection to science, it is just a distinction between different kinds of knowledge.
It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot.
The first distinction among men, and the first consideration that gave one precedence over another, was doubtless the advantage of beauty.
They envy the distinction I have won; let them therefore, envy my toils, my honesty, and the methods by which I gained it.
Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.
I think it likely that some of my pupils will reach unusual distinction.
A short term view will lead to a partial and perhaps twisted view of the whole picture. A crucial element may be missing. We may not be running the entire race. A friend of mine described a colleague as great at running the "ninety-five yard dash. " That is a distinction I can do without. Lacking the last five yards makes the first ninety-five pointless. In fact, serious runners thing of it as a 110 yard dash so that no one will best them in the last few yards. You've got to think beyond the whole.
Every person who has grown to any degree of usefulness, every person who has grown to distinction, almost without exception has been a person who has risen by overcoming obstacles, by removing difficulties, by resolving that when he met discouragement he would not give up.
Why separate your spiritual life and your practical life? To an integral being, there is no such distinction.
To be loved is to be fortunate, but to be hated is to achieve distinction.
We, as Americans, have won the lottery of life and the distinction between us and people living in Kalighat is not that we are smarter, not that we're harder working, not that we're more virtuous - it's that we're luckier.
Her (India's) great curse is caste; but English education has already proved a tremendous power in levelling the injurious distinctions of caste.
Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.
Character is the direct result of mental attitude. I believe that character is higher than the intellect. I believe that leadership is in sacrifice, in self-denial, in humility and in the perfectly disciplined will. This is the distinction between great and little men.
To all my friends without distinction I am ready to display my opulence: come one, come all; and whosoever likes to take a share is welcome to the wealth that lies within my soul.