What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Tomorrow is a satire on today And shows its weakness.

I learned a lot when I was 14 and 15 years old doing chores inside and outside the household, and as a result, I grew up with a good work ethic.

Haven, don't ask me to define the boundaries of normal. You know how I was raised. My father once struck strands of his own pubic hair onto a painting and sold it for a million dollars.

Anything that I do is something that I'm passionate about and really believe in, no matter how it turns out.

I don't think that people in America are really given enough information about the Third World.

Its clear there is an energy positive in producing ethanol.

I look for that stimulation constantly. I'm looking for inspiration and stimulation. Not bored with what we've done.

I really enjoy doing films, but I also love television. I certainly would not be against doing some regular television work and being on a show that runs several years.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'