The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

When you're scared, you stay as you are!

It is always easier to promote war than peace, easier to end the peace than end the war, because peace is fragile and war is durable.

A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself.

In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, 'That is mine!'.

If you imagine that everything is an exchange, then we're supposed to just transact and walk away. If we haven't walked away and we still have a relationship, it's because there's a debt.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

We (the ANC government) have no plans to introduce the wholesale administration of these drugs in the public sector. ARVs are not a cure for Aids.

Spiritual wisdom is now available to everyone, disseminated to the masses as never before in world history.

I paint what I think, not what I see.

We Californians are constantly accused of not having seasons, but we do. We have fire, flood, mud, and drought.