Without devotion, action and knowledge are cold and dry and many even become shackles.
The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind.
I have done almost every human activity inside a taxi which does not require main drainage.
When ordinary Soviet citizens are told that a vital trade agreement awarding their country most-favoured-nation status with the US is being blocked in Congress because Soviet Jews are demanding as an absolute right something few other inhabitants can expect as a special privilege - then the result is likely to be spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Semitism.
New York waiters, probably the surliest in the Western world. . . are better images of their city than that journalistic favorite the taxi driver.
You can never win as a sight-seer. Somebody else, more often than not the first person you meet when you get back home, has been there before you.
I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.
The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within. . . could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
If your standards are low, you're going to stop pretty early on in the process.
To learn without thinking is labour in vain, to think without learning is desolation.