My parents are good role models because they've worked hard and gave me a happy childhood.
There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.
I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.
Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. . . someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
These musicians, such as these Cubans in Havana, are a part of a scene that did produce great music and great musicians. They came from this tradition, so it's a good place to look. It's like prospecting: You gotta know where to look.
I covet honour in the same way as a miser covets gold.
I hated skiing or any other sport where there was an ambulance waiting at the bottom of the hill.
I like people trying to do two things at once.