Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root.

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.

It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.

If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.

The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.

Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.

We cannot pluck a flower witout disturbing a star.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

All that you need to be successful and significant in life is in and around you.

It sounded so weird when people called shoyu "soy sauce." It made it sound like Tabasco or something instead of the clean and perfect thing that it was.

Women like jewelry. They're like racoons: show them some shiny stuff and they'll follow you home.

I understand what the dynamic of the brand Ed Gordon has been all these years. I'm just trying to keep that as real and as honest as I can and I don't take it lightly.

Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

You've got to look for tough competition. You've got to want to beat the best.

Weapons are ominous tools. They are not the noble ruler's tools. He only uses them when he can't avoid it.

For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable.

I'm very much an optimist. I don't think I could do my work if I didn't believe there was some kind of hope for humanity.

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.