For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

We ignorant of ourselves beg often our own harms which the wise powers deny us for our good.

Medical costs are of concern, both in developing and developed countries.

In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.

If it is a woman's function to give, she must be replenished, too.

Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.

You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.

At the root of all power and motion, at the burning center of existence itself, there is music and rhythm.

I cannot find a faithful message-bearer," he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. "How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.

The man forget not, though in rags he lies, And know the mortal through a crown's disguise.

To become successful you must be a person of action. Merely to "know" is not sufficient. It is necessary both to know and do.