When you're passionate about something, you want it to be all it can be. But in the endgame of life, I fundamentally believe the key to happiness is letting go of that idea of perfection.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

V. S. Naipaul

I can't satisfy myself with just trying to tie all of my imagination into music, especially when music is not appreciated as an art form as much as it used to be.

Marilyn Manson

At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.

George Orwell

Beauty is worse than wine; it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder

Aldous Huxley

While eschewing emotion - and its companion, vulnerability - Obama should be careful not to sacrifice empathy, the 'I feel your pain' connection that sustained Clinton. This connection is the shorthand people use to measure their leaders' intentions. If people believe you're on their side, they will trust your decisions.

Dee Dee Myers

My brother and I had a real love-hate relationship with my success. There was some bitterness there that I didn't understand until recently, but I told him that if I ever did a record I wanted him to play on it.

Jimmy Chamberlin

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion, and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.

Karl Rahner

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Denis Diderot

A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.

Frank Lloyd Wright

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

Lewis Thomas

Women do not often fall in love with philosophers.

Samuel Richardson

In my teaching, I enjoyed creating models to clearly communicate my thoughts.

Erno Rubik