Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

It is really funny when people say you’d be obvious for a great villain.

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

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

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it’s this world or nothing. That’s a very powerful perception.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

A lot of people think I’m a comedian.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

All art is quite useless.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

It’s not a science when you are judging art, but we’d be remiss to say you can’t look at something and say, ‚This is more well done than that.‘

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.

I’m big on what’s in good taste.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

But to me nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

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.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

When people meet me, they say that I’m really kind – contrary to a lot of my music.

The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.