Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We have the universe to roam in in imagination. It is our virtue to be infinitely varied. The worst tyranny is uniformity.
Race is an invention, not a noticeable genetic presence, and cultural traits are brute concoctions of the social sciences.
I have nothing against the smell of rot but something against what hides the smell of rot in the United States of America.
Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.
There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it's practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don't.
Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.
He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
As we enter into exquisite awareness of the life that want to live as us, we learn to love deeply. - We claim our passion.
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.
Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.
The English have only three sauces - a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever.
What you don't want to know about yourself wants to be known, which is why it keeps 'showing up' at your door unannounced!
There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.
Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.
Motivation remains key to the marathon: the motivation to begin; the motivation to continue; the motivation never to quit.
eternity is a depth which no geometry can measure, no arithmetic calculate, no imagination conceive, no rhetoric describe.
We've got technological wonders around us, and we've used them to abrogate all responsibility for everything in our lives.
Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.
If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within five years men would be having abortions!
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.
I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.
Autumn finally arrived. And when it did, I came to a decision. Something had to give: I couldn't keep on living like this.
But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.
To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments.
the old ploy of the powerful: never refuse when you can confuse. Distraction and delay are always better than obstruction.
The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.
But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.
Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.
Anyone in pursuit of art is responding to a desire to make visible that which is not, to offer the unknown self to others.
Gaddafi tried to give a masterclass to men like the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, on how to crush a civilian uprising.
That alone can be called true refinement which elevates the soul of man, purifying the manners by improving the intellect.
If you depend on where the chestnuts are going to be, and where the deer are, you have to be attuned to the outside world.
How genuine is my capacity for love if there is no one for me to love, to laugh with, to treat tenderly, to be trusted by?
Words possess primitive mystical incantatory healing powers... Their articulation represents a complete, lived experience.
But, children, you should never let Such angry passions rise; Your little hands were never made To tear each other's eyes.
The way I see it, there is no greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism, of a sort so sincere it can only end in martyrdom.
What's gratifying is that it's my books that are being read and reread until they're battered over the years. I love that.
I have never forgotten the almost mystical power over an audience a storyteller has, when the story is deep and links you.
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.
Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.