Quotes By Author | Novelguide

"They were afraid, never having learned what I taught myself: Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear."

"Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre."

"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."

"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."

"Where there is love there is life."

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

"History never looks like history when you are living through it."

"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

"It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government."

"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants."

"I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets."

"Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy."

"My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes] has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful."

"For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul."

"If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it."

"God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny."

"Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else."

"Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be."

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

"It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block."

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities."

"Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!"

"My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It's the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz. You'll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond 'Z' and start poking around!"