There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

You can’t keep your mind on fighting when you’re thinking about a woman. You can’t keep your concentration. You feel like sleeping all the time.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don’t see why anybody does.

I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody’s mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

All art is but imitation of nature.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

I am not a televangelist.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

‚I am‘ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‚I do‘ is the longest sentence?

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

There is no gambling like politics.

I’m not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose… it’ll be much harder to detect.

All art is quite useless.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

The concept of commercialism in the fashion and art world is looked down upon. You know, just to think, ‚What amount of creativity does it take to make something that masses of people like?‘ And, ‚How does creativity apply across the board?‘

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

History is more or less bunk.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

The very phrase ‚foreign affairs‘ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

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.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.