We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.

When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should.

How grateful we are for you, our youth.

There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal.

I was a lot younger - when I wrote Water Lilies. I was like 26. It felt so natural to write about adolescence.

There is scarcely any fault in another which offends us more than vanity, though perhaps there is none that really injures us so little.

He who loses sight of the word of God, falls into despair; the voice of heaven no longer sustains him; he follows only the disorderly tendency of his heart.

First, how to sac my queen, then rook, then bishop, then knight, then pawns.

We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams