Wisdom

Laughter is a whip that keeps us in line. It's horrible to be laughed at against your will. Either you suppress unwelcome laughter or you start controlling it.

The attributes of a great lady may still be found in the rule of the four S's: Sincerity Simplicity Sympathy and Serenity.

The most important thing you learn as a sports photographer is anticipation - not where the action is taking place, but where it's going to take place. Not where the subject is now, but where they're going to be.

Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.

As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. The atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes...

Dragons don't ask for maidens, he said. Dragons are offered maidens. Alys shook her head to show she didn't understand.Is a king likely to be a maiden? Or a village headman? It's the men who make the laws that decree that maidens be offered.

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

Music . . . Can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

Celebrities and 'famous' people are just regular folks. I know, it's a shocking and potentially dangerous statement.

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and withoutcharacter and plot, no book can survive.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

Throwing dirt at a diamond does not diminish its value.

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

I'm going to be frank, Max...'Of course. All cards on the table.' But he gave me a poker smile.

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.

We have never understood how birds manage to fly,Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.