Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.
Composition is selective improvisation.
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.
The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Burning desire is the eternal flame.
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is. . . The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.
People would be a lot more skeptical if they understood that there is an incredible amount of chance in the results that you observe for active managers. The distribution of outcomes is enormously wide-but that's exactly what you'd expect by chance with lots of active managers who hold imperfectly diversified portfolios. The really good portfolios contain a lot of really lucky picks, and the really bad portfolios contain a lot of really unlucky picks as well as some really bad ones.
[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark. "She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].