Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I should be a postage stamp, because that’s the only way I’ll ever get licked. I’m beautiful. I’m fast. I’m so mean I make medicine sick. I can’t possibly be beat.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.

Muhammad Ali is a legend, a hero of mine.

The last thing you want is to not be recognized for all of the hard work you put in.

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.

Where love is, there God is also.

My life is my message.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes.

The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

I always dreamt of holding the bat and winning games for India. That was my inspiration to take up cricket.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

I’m crepuscular.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

Beauty and folly are old companions.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‚I’m with you kid. Let’s go.‘

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.