To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

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

My beauty secret is absolutely no sun.

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.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

If you have the opportunity to play this game of life you need to appreciate every moment. A lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it’s passed.

There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

I love to sit and eat quietly and enjoy each bite, aware of the presence of my community, aware of all the hard and loving work that has gone into my food.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

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

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

The way to know life is to love many things.

I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.