I didn't even graduate from high school. I've never told anybody that before. I got my degree later, when I was in the army.
Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be.
Though beauty is, with the most apt similitude, I had almost said with the most literal truth, called a flower that fades and dies almost in the very moment of its maturity; yet there is, methinks, a kind of beauty which lives even to old age; a beauty that is not in the features, but, if I may be allowed the expression, shines through them. As it is not merely corporeal it is not the object of mere sense, nor is it to be discovered but by persons of true taste and refined sentiment.
There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.
The mind's eye is perhaps no better fitted for the full radiance of truth, than is the body's for that of the sun.
Have you never seen a strange unconnected deformed representation of a figure, which seen in another point of view, became proportioned and agreeable? It is the picture of man.
One great reason why men practice generosity so little in the world, is, their finding so little there: generosity is catching; and if so many men escape it, it is in a great degree from the same reason that country-men escape the smallpox, because they meet no one to give it to them.
The timing & characteristics of state intervention affect not only organizational tactics and strategies, but the content and definition of interest itself. . . Some scholars have directly stressed that state interventions create corporatist forms. . . the formation, let alone the political capabilities, of such purely socioeconomic phenomena as interest groups and classes depends in significant measure on the structures and activities of the very states the social actors, in turn, seek to influence.
I feel lost not doing art, unsatisfied, anxious, bored. Everything else in comparison seems not terribly important.
I think NATO as a concept is good, but it is not as good as it was when it first evolved. And I think we bear the, you know, not only financially, we bear the biggest brunt of it.
Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.