Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

Like everyone, I have my challenges—but they sure don’t have me.

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

Even the highest branches cannot deny that they have roots in a common bond.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

When people score films, the job is to be visual. When people make music, it's about evoking feeling. It's great when you get both feelings and being out of their head.

Both scientists and sages have told us what we already know to be true in our hearts: everything is connected. Therefore as we change, the world cannot help but change with us.

The devil doesn't stay where there is music.

Obamacare is his. The stimulus is his. The economy is his. And yet Barack Obama still treats it as though it's being run by others and he's still fighting them and he's running into obstacles.

Globalization could be the answer to many of the world's seemingly intractable problems. But this requires strong democratic foundations based on a political will to ensure equity and justice.

I actually find extroversion to be a really appealing personality style.