Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.

Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.

Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains.

The wretch who digs the mine for bread, or ploughs, that others may be fed, feels less fatigued than that decreed to him who cannot think or read.

Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace; it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness.

Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.

Depart from discretion when it interferes with duty.

Goals help you overcome short-term problems.

Forgiveness is the economy of the heart... forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.

Love never reasons, but profusely gives; it gives like a thoughtless prodigal its all, and then trembles least it has done to little.

If faith produce no works, I see That faith is not a living tree. Thus faith and works together grow, No separate life they never can know. They're soul and body, hand and heart, What God hath joined, let no man part.

Goals help you overcome short - term problems.

Goals help you overcome short term problems.

Obstacles are those things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

Idleness among children as among men is the root of all evil and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.

Oblivion has been noticed as the offspring of silence.

Perfect purity, fullness of joy, everlasting freedom, perfect rest, health and fruition, complete security, substantial and eternal good.

Rage is for little wrongs; despair is dumb.

A small unkindness is a great offence.

It is a sober truth that people who live only to amuse themselves work harder at the task than most people do in earning their daily bread.

The sober comfort, all the peace which springs from the large aggregate of little things.

Since trifles make the sum of human things, And half our misery from our foibles springs.

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.

I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.

Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.

I would just like to say that opera is no longer about fat people in breastplates shattering wine glasses.

I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it.

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.

I was the first movie star to plunge into night-time soap opera.

In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a 'grand passion' than of a grand opera.

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.

Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like.

Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.

I was on a soap opera before that for three years, where I was the nicest guy on earth.

Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming.

I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me.

If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

But I won't deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.

You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

I was emotionally and physically punched in the stomach. This is not a place where you go and deliver the lines and then you come back. It's kind of a life-changing experience. But it can't get better than this for any actor - this is like an opera.

Opera is given so little attention in the national press.