A professional is an amateur who has been working for a long time.
Einstein said that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time. . . The wait is simply too long.
This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.
I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.
Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.
The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
I think a lot of people are so scared of failure that they don't put everything they have into whatever they want to do. I think, in turn, they write their own destiny.
My father always told me: 'Give somebody a hand and he'll take an arm.
The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.
I comfort myself with the reflection that your wife will possibly be able to curb your desire--I admit, a natural one for the most part--to exterminate your fellows.