“Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.”

I often prefer the shapes within the raw materials to ‘do their thing’, as this makes it movre interesting for me.

There’s an inherent message in my work relating to recycling and the nature of value, but my artistic inspiration is fired by the qualities within the raw materials.

I know that I am mortal and the creature of a day; but when I search out the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet no longer touch the earth, but, side by side with Zeus himself, I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of the gods.

As material fortune is associated with the properties of the body, so honor belongs to those of the soul.

Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.

There are three classes of friendship and enmity, since men are so disposed to one another either by preference or by need or by pleasure and pain.

It is clearly evident that most events of a widespread nature draw their causes from the enveloping heavens.

Mortal through I be, yea ephemeral, if but a moment I gaze up at the night’s starry domain of heaven, Then no longer on earth I stand; I touch the Creator, And my lively spirit drinketh immortality.

The length of life takes the leading place among inquiries about events following birth.

It’s only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.

It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.

I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.

I know what I want and it gets in my way. I know I’m not easy.

One of the sweet things about pain and sorrow is that they show us how well we are loved, how much kindness there is in the world, and how easily we can make others happy in the same way when they need help and sympathy.