If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of...

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything...

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.

I spend a lot of time balancing between faith and disbelief.

I've certainly thought a lot more about things like tyranny and patriotism and violence. I think I found some kind of clarity - definitely a thicker understanding.

Mirrors are the essence of movies.

It's always more interesting to take on someone that's going to have hidden sides or a fatal flaw, because there's going to be more to play with - more conflict, internally or in and around them - but...

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

Healthy people live with their world.

What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.

Every experience makes you a man.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit...

Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any...

Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

I would rather excel in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and possessions.

Magic is a state of mind. It is often portrayed as very black and gothic, and that is because certain practitioners played that up for a sense of power and prestige. That is a disservice. Magic is...

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings...

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I decided, very early on, just to accept life unconditionally; I never expected it to do anything special for me, yet I seemed to accomplish far more than I had ever hoped. Most of the time it just...