The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both.

Modern Christians should not mistake our post-Victorian sense of propriety for moral purity.

Empathy is a special application of the imagination. The ability to imagine what it would be like to experience what someone else is experiencing can be crucial to moral sensitivity.

Reading can break us out of the tunnel vision of the narrow specialty and lead us into many intriguing and important avenues of thought.

One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.

I don't look at a lot of design. I try to stay focused on making sculptural art pieces and somehow translating them into design.

Pay, pay anything rather than go to law.

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

You can never put too much pork in your mouth as far as I'm concerned.

In adversity assume the countenance of prosperity, and in prosperity moderate the temper and desires.

I am only fond of what comes from the heart.

Every film has to be the next something else; originality isn't celebrated because you can't market it.

The best advice on the art of being happy is about as easy to follow as advice to be well when one is sick.

In truth, he who is not content with what he has would not be content with whatever he acquires.