I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

When you’re 25 or 30, you know, you can’t wear lime-green eye shadow anymore.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.

A lot of people think I’m a comedian.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper, I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

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.

I don’t think the Christian Right dominates America in the way some in the media believe they do.

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

Beauty is the greatest seducer of man.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

Thanks to Botox and fillers, as well as the work that I’ve already had, my face pretty much maintains itself.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.