... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

To think of losing is to lose already.

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

... possessiveness cannot accept; it cannot even strike a fair bargain; it has to confer.

The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.

Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.

Inflation is the senility of democracies.

cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures.

One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.

Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.

Or the woman in front of me in the security line who asked if they would put her cat, Dave, through the luggage X-ray machine because she wanted to see if he'd eaten a necklace.

Certainly this is a duty not a sin. "Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness."

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.

Christian music has taken a turn towards worship music, which has turned into a lot of bands and those types of sounds. That's great. God is using that stuff and it's great.

I, along with the critics, have never taken myself very seriously.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Perverted pride is a great misfortune in men; but pride in its original function, for which God created it, is indispensable to a proper manhood.

We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I have a more direct avenue to expression as an artist than I ever would as a politician.

My priority is my son and my husband, and I have a lot of spinning plates, so I try to make sure they're not one of them.