I read the Life magazine articles about free love and free dope in California. At age 20 I drove to Los Angeles.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Willem de Kooning

...but most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that happened to be before his eyes.But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious.

Leo Tolstoy

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

H. L. Mencken

When you see what some girls marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.

Helen Rowland

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense.

Mark Twain

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

Abdul Kalam

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Christopher Hitchens

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

Emily Dickinson

Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

That man has reached immortality who is disturbed by nothing material.

Swami Vivekananda

There was a point - when I was a kid - where I said I wanted to be like Luke Skywalker, with blond hair and blue eyes. My mom right there told me to never be ashamed of who I am.

Chaske Spencer

You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.

Laurence J. Peter