It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

There's room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.

Africa, help me to go home, carry me like an aged child in your arms. Undress me and wash me. Strip me of all of these garments, strip me as a man strips off dreams when the dawn comes. . . .

In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.

The weakness of most men they do not know how to become a stone or tree.

Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.

And let me die suddenly, to be born again in the revelation of beauty....And the revelation of beauty is the wisdom of the ancestors.

Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.

A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.

Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.

[Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

To lay aside all prejudices, is to lay aside all principles. He who is destitute of principles is governed by whims.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

And if you are strong enough, then you can grow as a conductor more and more.

I started with self gone missing.

We deserve punishment and get forgiveness; we deserve God’s wrath and get God’s love.

The Spirit calls me, and I must go.

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.