It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.

Henri Matisse

A first-rate Organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.

Arnold Bennett

I used to do this as a kid. And now they're paying me for it, which is cool.

William Kempe

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Mark Twain

I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

Sir Arthur Eddington

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Claude LeviStrauss

The simplest school boy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

Ernest Renan

Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business.

Clara Barton

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.

Thomas A. Edison

In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business and I wanted to try to reflect that.

John Green

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may say with confidence that he is a good man.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky