When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn’t any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

The physical sensation of gliding with the wind in your face is exhilarating. That automatic activity of pedalling, when you have to be awake but not think too much, allows you to let subconscious thoughts bubble up, and things seem to just sort themselves out. And the adrenaline wakes you up if you weren’t properly alert.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

History is written by the victors.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn’t theirs.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Swimming has its educational value – mental, moral, and physical – in giving you a sense of mastery over an element, and of power of saving life, and in the development of wind and limb.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.

Often, in the real world, it’s not the smart that get ahead but the bold.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. ‚A miracle a minute‘ would not be a bad slogan for God.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

Obama’s policies have been approximately the same as Bush’s, though there have been some slight differences, but that’s not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush’s policies.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

I don’t like allegories.

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?