James > James's Quotes

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Creativity takes courage. ”
― Henri Matisse

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
― John Locke

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works

“There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot