Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.
I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two.
It is difficult to suddenly give up a long love. Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem
Who now travels that dark path from whose bourne they say no one returns. [Lat. , Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum Illue unde negant redire quemquam. ]
What woman says to fond lover should be written on air or the swift water. [Lat. , Mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, In vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua. ]
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then a thousand more.
It is difficult to lay aside a confirmed passion.
Never have your wallet with you onstage. It's bad luck. You shouldn't play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money. Tom Waits (to me, about 1986 or so)
One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they've failed more often than everyone else.
That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights--the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's; but the way in which we expound these rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights.