That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.
|
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas-a place where history comes to life.
|
We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word. From India, out of the Vedas, we still hear: On the spoken word, all the gods depend, all beasts and men; in the world live all creatures...The word is the name of the divine world.
|
What was significant about the laughter . . . was not just the fact that it provides internal exercise for a person . . .a form of jogging for the innards, but that it creates a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work, too.
|
I'm very happy to be back in touch with a part of myself. It's surreal. For 35 years, I never thought I'd be reunited with the music I wrote during the Creedence Clearwater Revival years. After meeting with Norman Lear, Hal Gaba, and Glen Barros (President of Concord), I'm happy to say that the new Fantasy is very enthusiastic about my body of work. All the people there have been delightful. They are honoring my songs that hold an important place in the history of American music. And, they are honoring me.
|
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas a place where history comes to life.
|
There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.
|
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
|
The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
|
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
|
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
|
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.
|
The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.
|
We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world. It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armor, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth -- all these belong to the old period. But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.
|
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
|
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
|
The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
|
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
|
What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes. Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings-- they are so trite, so threadbare. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot be far wrong. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through fire.
|
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
|
What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings -- they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong.
|
A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.
|
Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.
|
The boast that the United States is now the world's only superpower has a grim undertow in the area of human rights; no one can tell Washington what to do or not do, no matter how egregious its cruelties.
|
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
|
The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives -- the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
|
Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of her (or his) own conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.
|
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
|
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known -- that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
|
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
|