"I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself."
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902

"A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns."
G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology, 1940

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Aristotle

"Anything too stupid to be said, is sung"
Voltaire

"I have been a stranger in a strange land. "
Old Testament Exodus ii. 22.

"So, naturalists observe, a flea has smaller fleas that on him prey; and these have smaller still to bite 'em; and so proceed ad infinitum."
Jonathan Swift

"The true method of knowledge is experiment."

"The smallest feline is a masterpiece."
Leonardo Da Vinci

"If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats."
Aldous Huxley

"A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all it's hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering."

"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
Heinrich Heine 1823

"I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can not stop eating peanuts."
Orson Welles

"The people who make art their business are mostly impostors."
Pablo Picasso

"Hell is full of musical amateurs."
George Bernard Shaw

"That is the truest sign of insanity - insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy."

"Man is what he believes."
Anton Chekhov

"Who shall stand guard to the guards themselves?"

"Unlike grownups, children have little need to deceive themselves."

"Imagination cannot make fools wise; but she can make them happy, to the envy of reason, who can only make her friends miserable."

"In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom--for example, in senates and learned societies."

"Science has promised us truth...It has never promised us either peace or happiness."

"Only when we know little do we know anything; doubt grows with knowledge."

"Mechanical excellence is the only vehicle of genius."

"If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place."

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."

"We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others."

"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals."

"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."

"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death."

"I thought a book if necessary should be a hammer, a hand grenade which you detonate under a stagnant way of looking at the world."

"He knows not how to speak who cannot be silent...Loudness is impotence."

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

"Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind."

"Our world is merely a practical joke of God."

"This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature."

"But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

"By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man."

"The world is full of shipping clerks who have read the Harvard Classics."

"I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two thirds of the people of the earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start over again, and civilization could be restored."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

"Religion...is the opium of the people."

"Make your mind large as the world is large and you can understand paradox."

"Silence gives consent."

"One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say."

"A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space. On the back it said, 'Wish you were here.' "

"I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time."

"I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world."

"I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room."

"Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself."

"As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly."

"For men to search their own glory is not glory."

"It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well."

"There is no substitute for hard work."

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

"The bible is literature, not dogma."

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."

"Prejudice is the reason of fools."

"Give a man a mask and he will tell the truth."

"Character is simply habit long continued."

"It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill."

"We mean well and do ill, and then justify our ill-doing by our well-meaning."

"...All art therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music--which is the art of arts."

"Materialists and madmen never have doubts."

"There was never a good war or a bad peace."

"Whosoever offends an innocent person, pure and guiltless, his evil comes back on that fool himself like fine dust thrown against the wind."

"I come not bearing peace, but a sword."

"Poetry is devil's wine."

"Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind."

"I don't know about God...The only things I know about are what I can see, hear, feel and smell."

"There is nothing permanent except change."

"The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing."

"Who wishes to be creative, must first destroy and smash accepted values."

"Every religion in the world that has destroyed people is based on love."

"The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities."

"Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters."

"Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, and beautiful in art."

"All art is quite useless."

"All great ideas are dangerous."

"You must destroy the press; or the press will destroy us."

"The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom... for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough."

"Speak, so that I may see you."

"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."

"Man is free the moment he wants to be."

"The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it."

"From dreams to reality is a long way."

"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time in which to read them; but generally the purchase of a book is mistaken for the acquisition of its contents."

"A great man, did you say? All I see is the actor creating his own ideal image."

"A person can't be creative and conformist at the same time."
J.A. Meyer

"The first duty of man is to be artificial."

"Seeing they refuse to understand anything whatsoever, the best solution would be for them all to get killed instantly..."

"Man is a bad animal!"

"Rigid spirits are the first to fall"

"We are creating the future."

"Whether you listen to Mozart or Duke Ellington, you can deepen your understanding of music only by being a more conscious and aware listener--not someone who is just listening, but listening for something."

"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year. "

"Everything belongs to me because I am poor."

"Live your life as a work of art."

"...there is a tendency to turn the mind away from what I shall call the higher mathematics of music in order to degrade music to servile employment, and to vulgarize it by adapting it to the requirements of an elementary utilitarianism--"

"Life is like the Olympic games; a few men strain their muscles to carry off a prize, others sell trinkets to the crowd for a profit; some just come to see how everything is done."

"By morality the individual is taught to become a function of the herd, and to ascribe to himself value only as a funtion... Morality is the herd instinct in the individual."

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."

"God is dead."

"Indeed, without death man would scarcely philosophize."

"One cat just leads to another."

"Good is restraint of the tongue."

The Master said, ...'Have no friends not equal to yourself.'

"The Conservative Party is not a party but a conspiracy."

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

"The man who commits sin is the slave of the sin."

"The needs of a society determine its ethics..."

"Language is a virus"

"Design is tribute art pays to industry"

"To think too much is a disease..."

"And man has actually invented God..."

"We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems..."

"The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art."

"The spoon does not understand the flavor of the soup."

"I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead."

"Never forget that the human race with technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine."

"Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race."

"[Three classes]: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see."

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."

"Ronald Reagan is an ignoramus, a conscious and persistent falsifier of fact, a deceiver of the electorate, and, one suspects of himself."

"I was just sitting in my room and it was snowing, and it was time to go out to scrimmage, time to go out in the snow and the mud and bang yourself around. And then, suddenly, on the radio it started-Beethoven! I said, 'I'm going to be an artist. I'm not going to be a football player.' That's the night I didn't go to scrimmage. And I never went back to football, see."

"Don't keep searching for the truth, just let go of your opinions."

"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."
Joseph Campbell

"The warrior's approach is to say "yes" to life: "yea" to it all."
Joseph Campbell