Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Be at peace with your own soul, then heaven and earth will be at peace with you.

Saint Isaac of Nineveh

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.

T. E. Lawrence

After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.

Paulo Coelho

Dissents are appeals to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of another day.

Charles Evans Hughes

There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.

Robert Nelson

The institutions of human society treat us as parts of a machine. They assign us ranks and place considerable pressure upon us to fulfill defined roles. We need something to help us restore our lost and distorted humanity. Each of us has feelings that have been suppressed and have built up inside. There is a voiceless cry resting in the depths of our souls, waiting for expression. Art gives the soul's feelings voice and form.

Daisaku Ikeda

Today there are people trying to take away rights that our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for: our right to vote, our right to choose, affordable quality education, equal pay, access to health care. We the people can't let that happen.

Kerry Washington

Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.

Peter Drucker

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Virginia Woolf

I've always been at war with myself, for right or wrong.

Brad Pitt

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Jean Francois Lyotard

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

Margaret Atwood