Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.

Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap.

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.

An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.

By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.

Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.

The characteristic of coquettes is affectation governed by whim.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Affectation is certain deformity; by forming themselves on fantastic models, the young begin with being ridiculous, and often end in being vicious.

I'm trying to learn to smoke, which is rather weird when everyone is trying to stop. I'm not a smoker. But my character only smokes as an affectation.

I have no affectation when I speak.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.

I don't like affectation.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.