Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Don’t gain the world and lose your soul; wisdom is better than silver or gold.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‚hopey changey stuff,‘ she was right: there was nothing there.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

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.

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.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character. When there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home. When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.

I’m not a macroeconomics person.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

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

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

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.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Oh, hour of forgiven sin, moment of perfect pardon, our soul shall never forget you while, within you, life and being find immortality!

When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul, and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Men always want and love when women wear tight and fitted clothing, right? And you’re like, ‚Wow, she looks so beautiful.‘ And then you have men who dress like slobs, and you’re like, ‚What’s the deal with these big and baggy suits.‘ It’s pretty ridiculous.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

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.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

Stylistically, I love make-up. I love doing my own make-up and stuff, but clothes-wise, I actually didn’t ever really care. Initially the fashion world was more interested in me than the music world, which was strange when I first started singing.

If you judge, investigate.

Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Last year we said, ‚Things can’t go on like this‘, and they didn’t, they got worse.

I’m no natural beauty. If I’m gonna have any looks at all, I’m gonna have to create them.