The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.

Amy Tan

The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.

Jean de la Bruyere

There is genius in persistence. It conquers all opposers. It gives confidence. It annihilates obstacles. Everybody believes in a determined man. People know that when he undertakes a thing, the battle is half won, for his rule is to accomplish whatever he sets out to do.

Orison Swett Marden

I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things. For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities. But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?

Kij Johnson

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Honore de Balzac

Funny is only something that others know about you - you can't be funny by yourself.

Chris Rock

There's not a wind but whispers of thy name; And not a flow'r that grows beneath the moon, But in its hues and fragrance tells a tale Of thee, my love.

Barry Cornwall

Having bodyguards is just part of being famous, I think.

Dolph Lundgren

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Ezra Pound

Before I went to jail, I was active in politics as a member of South Africa's leading organization - and I was generally busy from 7 A.M. until midnight. I never had time to sit and think.

Nelson Mandela

Although my family - parents and sister - all work in the personnel management business, their real passion is performing, amateur operatic societies and so on.

Michael Sheen

My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

Laurence Housman