I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.

Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.

You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.

There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.

I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.

It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.

The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.

Tears are the souls raindrops softening the hard ground life can produce.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

Very often, I don't make it through moments of recording because it is genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous that a 60-year-old grown man is making these noises.

The pair of opposites do not effect a yogi - neither praise nor insult.

It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one's country.

I would hit you on the head with a rock and drag you away from this. But it would only shatter the rock.

The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.

The worst sin against stewardship is to waste your life.

Sometimes, as practice for trying to convince myself that God exists, I try to convince my shadow that the sun exists.

I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience.