James Taylor

I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent. 

I don't think anyone really says anything new. 

I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could. 

I think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else. 

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be. 

I was a functional addict. 

I was in chemical jail. 

I'm very unstable; there's no stability in a musician's life at all. You live on a bus or on the road hand to mouth and you don't know where your money's coming from. 

If I were to try to identify a turning point I'd say that was it - getting clean. 

If the gig's going really well, I'm incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things.

Being on a boat that's moving through the water, it's so clear. Everything falls into place in terms of what's important and what's not. 

Certain things in life are more important than the usual crap that everyone strives for. 

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I'm as bald as a billiard ball! 

I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character. 

I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music. 

I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.

Douglas MacArthur

I have just returned from visiting the Marines at the front, and there is not a finer fighting organization in the world!  

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away. 

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes. 

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier? 

I've looked that old scoundrel death in the eye many times but this time I think he has me on the ropes. 

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. 

In war there is no substitute for victory. 

In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash. 

It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it. 

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. 

Life is a lively process of becoming.

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye. 

My first recollection is that of a bugle call. 

Never give an order that can't be obeyed. 

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

Peter O'Toole

Films were never in my budget. Didn't occur to me till much later. I hoped for a long, good life, which I've had and I'm having as an actor. I didn't expect the rest. 

I have no memories I'm prepared to share with you. 

I love working with young people, which is to me a big kick. 

I loved doing My Favorite Year, which was great fun, and The Ruling Class, which I made with all my chums. 

I tell my children to avoid theatre and go into cinema and TV. 

I was apprehensive about bringing off this Homer. 

I wouldn't mind being a lord. 

I'm a working stiff, baby, just like everybody else. 

I'm the most gregarious of men and love good company, but never less alone when alone. 

If I'm not at my study by 10:00, 10:30, forget it, I can't write a word.

It's my job, it's what I do, it's what I'm on earth to do and it's who I am. 

It's very inconvenient because every time I finish, let's say, a chapter of a book, I think I'm going to ring Richard and then realize: Oh, Christ, I've buried him. I buried him last year. 

Life turned out much better than I thought. I knew after a little while that I could act. 

My dear sir, it haunted me for the rest of my life. 

My own favorite is something called Rogue Male. 

The good parts are the people who don't make do. They're the interesting people. Lear doesn't make do. 

A. E. Housman

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think. 

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. 

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. 

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. 

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. 

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young. 

I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word. 

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. 

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning. 

Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write. 

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale. 

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again. 

The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic. 

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

Auguste Rodin

I invent nothing, I rediscover. 

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight. 

Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages. 

Nobody does good to men with impunity. 

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. 

Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump. 

The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him. 

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect. 

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth. 

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature. 

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

Dick Gregory

And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede. 

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned. 

I am really enjoying the new Martin Luther King Jr stamp - just think about all those white bigots, licking the backside of a black man. 

I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark. 

I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that. 

I wouldn't mind paying taxes - if I knew they were going to a friendly country. 

I'm not a comic. I'm a humorist. 

If it wasn't for Abe Lincoln, I'd still be on the open market. 

If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you. 

In America, with all of its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun. But we don't know yet whether that sun is rising or setting for our country.

Just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine. 

Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten. 

Riches do not delight us so much with their possession, as torment us with their loss. 

We thought I was going to be a great athlete, and we were wrong, and I thought I was going to be a great entertainer, and that wasn't it either. I'm going to be an American Citizen. First class. 

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Tom Wolfe

A cult is a religion with no political power. 

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested. 

At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan. 

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting. 

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. 

It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved. 

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live. 

On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe. 

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. 

The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone. 

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves. 

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave. 

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past. 

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

Max Planck

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.

It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.

No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

Chief Joseph

I cannot tell how much my heart suffered for my people while at Leavenworth. 

I did not want my people killed. I did not want bloodshed. 

I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done. 

I hope that no more groans of wounded men and women will ever go to the ear of the Great Spirit Chief above, and that all people may be one people. 

I know that my race must change. 

I labored hard to avoid trouble and bloodshed. 

I only ask of the government to be treated as all other men are treated. 

I pressed my father's hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit land.

An Indian respects a brave man, but he despises a coward. 

For a short time we lived quietly. But this could not last. White men had found gold in the mountains around the land of winding water. 

From where the sun now stands I will fight no more. 

General Howard informed me, in a haughty spirit, that he would give my people 30 days to go back home, collect all their stock, and move onto the reservation. 

Good words will not give me back my children. 

Governor Isaac Stevens of the Washington Territory said there were a great many white people in our country, and many more would come; that he wanted the land marked out so that the Indians and the white man could be separated. 

Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Edward Hopper

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.

I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.

I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.

I think that zinc white has a property of scaling and cracking.

I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.

I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that's all the varnish I use.

If I had the energy, I would have done it all over the county.

If the picture needs varnishing later, I allow a restorer to do that, if there's any restoring necessary.

If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.

If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

More of me comes out when I improvise.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.