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.

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.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

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.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.