Famous Quotes & Sayings

Agnes Smedley

To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.

Agnes Martin

What I say is that we're capable of a transcendent response, and I think it makes us happy. And I do think beauty produces a transcendent response.

Charlie Chaplin

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

Charlie Chaplin

Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels.

Charles Dudley Warner

There is no beauty like that which was spoiled by an accident; no accomplishments and graces are so to be envied as those that circumstances rudely hindered the development of.

Charles Caleb Colton

That is true beauty which has not only a substance, but a spirit; a beauty that we must intimately know, justly to appreciate.

Toba Beta

When I feel the beauty in words, I am sensing the logic of heart.

Sugar Ray Leonard

I watched Muhammad Ali, how when he would speak, how it was such a thing of beauty. It sounded so wonderful. And I wanted to be like him.

Theodore Bikel

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sing about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

Carlos Castaneda

When a man has fulfilled all four of these requisites-to be wide awake, to have fear, respect, and absolute assurance-there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his actions lose the blundering quality of the acts of a fool. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that.

Carlos Castaneda

If his spirit is distorted he should simply fix it-purge it, make it perfect-because there is no other task in our entire lives which is more worthwhile...To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, our manhood.

Carlos Castaneda

To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other.

Carlos Castaneda

Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. On the other hand, for the warrior who has no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with his acts. And above all, no one pins him down with their thoughts and their expectations.

Carlos Castaneda

There are lots of things a warrior can do at a certain time which he couldn't do years before. Those things themselves did not change; what changed was his idea of himself.

Carlos Castaneda

A rule of thumb for a warrior is that he makes his decisions so carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise him, much less drain his power.

Carlos Castaneda

The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

Stacy Schiff

When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'

Charlie Chaplin

Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.

C. S. Lewis

Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

Charles Dickens

Why then we should drop into poetry.

David McCullough

Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.

Louis MacNeice

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

Jessica White

I'm a poet first and foremost, before the modelling.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The poet should size the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal

Eugenio Montale

The poet does not know and often will never know his true receiver.

Archibald MacLeish

A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.

Austin O'Malley

A small poet repeats himself like a clock.

Kathryn Harrison

I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.

Kent Haruf

I write in a journal first, briefly. Then read something I've read many times before, for about half an hour, then rework what I wrote the day before.

Kent Haruf

Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.

Alan Furst

I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.

Ed Emberley

I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.

Gail Carson Levine

I wrote as a kid, but I never wanted to be a writer, particularly. I had been drawing and painting for years and loved that.

Alice Walker

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

Natalie Babbitt

My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.

William Gibson

In 1981, I was a futurist - or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally - and I wrote about the 21st century.