Obsessions of the Orient, of the desert, of its ardor and its emptiness, of the shadows of palm gardens, of the garments white and wide - obsessions where the senses go berserk, where nerves are exasperated, and which made me, at the onset of each night, believe sleep impossible.

Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor.

Ray Charles

Breaking childhood teachings is never easy, and in essence, they are like white noise that can sometimes stop us from listening to ourselves, or having to listen to ourselves.

Ramani Durvasula

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Pablo Picasso

No affection and a great brain, these are the people to command the world.

Benjamin Disraeli

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.

Helen Keller

You can't put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get.

Michael Phelps

In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

Peter Ustinov

All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.

Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort

It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health, you worry about getting ruptured or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.

J. P. Donleavy

Will you not allow that I have as much of the spirit of prophecy in me as the swans? For they, when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long, do then sing more lustily than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are going to the god they serve.

Plato

You've got to take the bitter with the sour.

Samuel Goldwyn