Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.

Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.

Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.

Life is to blame for everything.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.

Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.

It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.

What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.

The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.

A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?

The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.

Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.

It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument

'Man is an endangered species,' announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump 'Battlefield Earth.' And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

If you go out eight times and play tennis eight times this week, yeah, it's the same rules, but it's a different game every time you're out on that court. You're working on a different part of your game every time you're out on that court; your partner's working on a different part of their game, and the act of being watched changes it.

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.

The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein's hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect.

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have

I'm about to start working with a singer I met on my last trip: she'll get international exposure, and I'll have a song out in that market sung in Cantonese.

I took it personal. I got slammed quite a bit.

Innocence is a language only mother nature teaches.

If there's been a crisis in a market, you don't tend to have a new crisis in that market until the people who went through the last crisis aren't in the system anymore.

Where I once constantly lost my temper, I found myself arriving at a crisis and experiencing peace.

Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.

I really miss a lot of my friends out there.

Is it honest for me to go and sit there on communion day and drink the wine and eat the bread while feeling it all to be mummery?

I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky.

We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed.

Chicago's like Melbourne - there's a city center, there's public transport, and there's more of a cultural scene.

Avoiding maturity is, for many men, not just a cute hobby, but a life's work - often handsomely rewarded in the infantile popular culture of the West.

I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards.

A practical botanist will distinguish at the first glance the plant of the different quarters of the globe and yet will be at a loss to tell by what marks he detects them.

Tour is fun.

I loved the Little Lulu stories, where she would fantasize that her bedroom rug would turn into a pool of water, and she could dive down into the center of the world.

The ultimate goal of human life is to transcend culture and personality to the unconditioned pure being. But the means to do this is through our culture and way of life.

I like to maintain my collection as a provocative collection that makes people think. While certainly my stamp will be visible on Black Fleece, it is meant for a wider audience.

A position of dignity is more easily improved upon than acquired.