Few things in the world are more powerful than a positive push. A smile. A world of optimism and hope. A 'you can do it' when things are tough.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

William Hazlitt

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

Miles Davis

On the contrary, art consists of inventing and not copying. The Italian Renaissance is a period of artistic decadence. Those men, devoid of their predecessors' inventiveness, thought they were stronger as imitators-that is false. Art must be free in its inventiveness, it must raise us above too much reality. This is its goal, whether it is poetry or painting. The plastic life, the picture, is made up of harmonious relationships among volumes, lines, and colors. These are the three forces that must govern works of art. If, in organizing these three essential elements harmoniously, one finds that objects, elements of reality, can enter into the composition, it may be better and may give the work more richness. But they must be subordinated to the three essential elements mentioned above. Modern work thus takes a point of view directly opposed to academic work. Academic work puts the subject first and relegates pictorial values to a secondary level, if there is room.For us others, it is the opposite. Every canvas, even if nonrepresentational, that depends on harmonious relationships of the three forces-color, volume, and line-is a work of art. I repeat, if the object can be included without shattering the governing structure, the canvas is enriched.Sometimes these relationships are merely decorative when they are abstract. But if objects figure in the composition-free objects with a genuine plastic value-pictures result that have as much variety and profundity as any with an imitative subject.

Fernand Leger

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Arthur Schopenhauer Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

Henry David Thoreau

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

John Dewey

It takes one hour of preparation for each minute of presentation time.

Wayne Burgraff

I perfectly understood President Obama's attitude throughout the French presidential campaign. He had no reason to distance himself from Nicolas Sarkozy. It's the basic solidarity that leaders who worked together owe to each other.

Francois Hollande

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

Aldous Huxley

Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent.

Euripides

This chain of human ancestors was totally unknown to Darwin. He could not have even dreamed of such a flood of proof and truth.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side.

Oliver Goldsmith