As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.

How blessings brighten as they take their flight.

Too low they build who build below the skies.

A soul without reflection, like a pile Without inhabitant, to ruin runs.

Narcissus is the glory of his race: For who does nothing with a better grace?.

How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful, is man!... Midway from nothing to the Deity!

Early, bright, transient, chaste as morning dew, She sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven.

The clouds may drop down titles and estates, and wealth may seek us, but wisdom must be sought.

Where boasting ends, there dignity begins.

Who lives to Nature, rarely can be poor ; who lives to fancy, never can be rich.

Leisure is pain; take off our chariot wheels; how heavily we drag the load of life!

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

The unsuspected is the daily fare of the traveler in Thibet.

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

I wish I had a dime for every dime I have.

What someone calls my books is irrelevant to me. I consider them works of art and rules and categories and labels mean nothing.

The reason that women do not love one another is - men.

It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.

There's a difference between watching a film and watching a bit of cinema and enjoying a film as a piece of cinema.

Vagabonding is an attitude — a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word.

Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.