Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development

There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place

George Santayana, letter to Mary

I don't tolerate politics that come from anger. I want a politics derived from beauty... I don't admire politicians, but poets. (Rubem Alves, p. 189)

Mev Puleo

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

Diane Ackerman

I began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.

Roberto Cavalli

Kindness is tenderness. Kindness is love, but perhaps greater than love. Kindness is good will. Kindness says, I want you to be happy.

Randolph Ray

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

Thornton Wilder

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

Jack Kerouac

I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.

LaoTzu

Caricature is rough truth.

George Meredith

Freedom is a condition of mind, and the best way to secure it is to breed it.

Elbert Hubbard

May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.

Paul Cezanne, Letter to Emile Be

If you become a teacher, by your pupils you'll be taught.

Oscar Hammerstein II