I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color--something which exists before all forms and colors appear... No matter what god or doctrine you b...
It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right c...
Each person has a self-image that, to some degree, does not match reality. A significant difference between self-image and reality can be harmful. The more self-aware you are, the less likely you are to be vulnerable to your illusions. The more aware...
I am truly multi-racial. I never knew my biological father. I've always had less information than I would have liked to have had. All I know from my mother is that I have connections to many different cultures.
I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it bec...
O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come ali...
In the four decades after World War II, manufacturing jobs paid more than other jobs for given skills. But that is much less true today. Increased international competition has forced American manufacturers to reduce costs. As a result, the pay premi...
We never know who we are going to be until we are tested, but perhaps we can test ourselves without going to the extremes of war. Perhaps we can be kinder now, live with less now, reach out to others now - and build an inner reserve of a strong ident...
Far in the back of her mind she was thinking. But she could not dredge up these half-formed feelings, these obscure bits of ideas, into clear, definite thoughts. . . . Her mind ticked away, singing a song she could not decipher.
Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men...
The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the...
If you want a man to trust you, ask him for a favor. Most people get this part wrong. They try to win people over by offering something to them, but humans instinctively recoil from those who help them. They like the people that they help far better,...
This much should be clear by now: the term 'renaissance' can only remain fruitful and demanding as long as it refers to a far-reaching idea: that it is the fate of Europeans to develop life and forms of life according to and alongside the Christian d...
That's what makes it so right. Your eyes—your soul is there, but the rest of you is still so undefined. That's the beauty of childhood. The eyes show everything you've seen so far, but the rest of you is still so open to possibility, to whatever yo...
I'd made it this far and refused to give up because all my life I had always finished the race.
Education will only take you so far. To go even further, I’d recommend getting a piggyback ride from a midget half your body weight.
In some parallel universe, there was a Gansey who could tell Blue that he found the ten inches of her bare calves far more tantalizing than the thirteen cubic feet of bare skin Orla sported. But in this universe, that was Adam’s job. He was in a te...
The purpose of God is far greater than your own personal fulfillment or your peace of mind, or even your happiness, your family, your career or even your dreams and ambitions.
No one has proved to me that my husband isn’t still alive somewhere in Southeast Asia. So, as far as I’m concerned, if even one man is alive, we own him more than this – than presuming him dead for the sake of tidying paperwork.
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, ...
... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, t...
