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.

Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.

Both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom: the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

Polygamy: An endeavour to get more out of life than there is in it.

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

Nature is wont to hide herself.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

I was ashamed to admit I was hipped to the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

Life is about conduct and how we conduct ourselves. But two wrongs never make a right.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

I mean, if you didn’t get it or if you didn’t feel like you enjoyed it, sometimes that experience can change.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

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

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

The time has come for all evangelists to practice full financial disclosure. The world is watching how we walk and how we talk. We must have the highest standards of morality, ethics and integrity if we are to continue to have influence.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.