If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a reference, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves. But, nature offers you millions — all on the same tree. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.
Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
Confine yourself to the present.
Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.
In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
If a person doesn’t know to which port they sail, no wind is favorable.
If I don’t have red, I use blue.
The hardly bearable ecstasy of direct energy exploding on your nerve endings.
Fear is a liar.
Productivity is the enemy of original thought.
It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, the ones most responsive to change.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom
You’re telling me I can dodge bullets?” “I’m trying to tell you that — when you’re ready — you won’t have to.
If you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader, sell ice cream.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Relax, no one else knows what they’re doing either.
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.