Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.
But Time is a great traitor who teaches us to accept loss.
Art should be truth; and truth, unadorned, unsentimentalized, is beauty.
I was like many another who starts an intrigue timidly. Once into it, I had to go on, and therefore I had to harden my sensibilities.
Now I had lived long enough and had heard enough from urchins my age and from other slaves, to distrust the person who calls himself merciful, or just, or kindly. Usually these are the most cruel, niggardly and selfish people, and slaves learn to fear the master who prefaces his remarks with tributes to his own virtues.
The eye is complicated. It mixes the colors [it sees] for you. . . The painter must unmix them and lay them on again shade by shade, and then the eye of the beholder takes over and mixes them again.
And how to paint your lovely hands, fluttering over the silks like two dark birds?
The secret to all power is to only do that which all would willingly do.
Absolutely. I am a father, and I know best. If there's any question, just ask me.
If leadership is the act of going beyond what is. . . it begins by going beyond what is within ourselves.
Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.