Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.

It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.

True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.

We cannot truly face life until we face the fact that it will be taken away from us.

The most fun characters to work with are characters that are complicated.

A half-hour walk is the most beneficial thing you can do for your ailments.

In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.

Teach girls to read and to work at something where they can bring home money - and the entire balance of power shifts.

To be black and beautiful means nothing in this world unless we are black and powerful.

Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you've...um...entertained his wife.

... we never do any thing well, unless we love it for its own sake.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Both my study of Scripture and my career in entertaining children have taught me to cherish them.