I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know.

Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

Sometimes you remind me a lot of James. He called it my 'furry little problem' in company. Many people were under the impression that I owned a badly behaved rabbit.

He suggested devils, skulls, harsh masculine drawings. This thing was…heart poundingly good. She wanted to pluck it, and bury her face in it, and keep it in a vase by her bedside.

Let thy life be thy gracious treasure.

I think it is important to know when to be hard on yourself and when to let things go, but always keep going.

I have always said I will be in politics to serve as best as I can and it will take me wherever it will take me.

Basically speaking, conducting is quite a healthy profession.

Instead of blaming everyone and everything else for your problems, pray for God to help you take an inventory of what's been on your mind so you can think about what you've been thinking about.

They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

They are done merely for ornament. ... the common people regard them as supernatural.