Quotes to inspire and reflect

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

Man creates culture and through culture creates himself.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Of course, there must be subtleties. Just make sure you make them obvious.

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

I created nothing; I invented nothing; I imagined nothing; I perverted nothing; I simply discovered drama in real life.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.

What art offers is space—a certain breathing room for the spirit.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Those move easiest who have learned to dance.

God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing.

Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.

He who sings frightens away his ills.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Where words fail, music speaks.

When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers it’s research.

Art extends each man’s short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men’s lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

I like to have a man’s knowledge comprehend more than one class of topics, one row of shelves. I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.