“Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.”

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.

Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me…I don’t know which makes me feel worse.

Speech is civilization itself.

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!

As far as beauty is concerned, in order to be confident we must accept that the way we look and feel is our own responsibility.

Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop–you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.

In deep self acceptance, grows a compassionate understanding.

Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro – and beautiful!

In a basic way, acceptance is seeing clearly what’s happening and holding it with kindness. This is a radical antidote to the suffering of judging mind.

Well, the title “An Inconvenient Truth” is a way of highlighting the reasons why some people, including the president, don’t seem to accept the truth.

I accept my body. I accept how I am and make the best of what I am given.

I sing to the realists, people who accept it like it is. I express problems. There are tears when it’s sad and smiles when it’s happy. It seems simple to me, but for some people, I guess feelin’ takes courage.