Paul Secor > Paul's Quotes

“To feel is perhaps the most terrifying thing in this society.”
― Cecil Taylor, Penguin Plays Traverse Plays

“It is very difficult to stop feeling.”
― Raymond Moore

“A book can be an escape from the house.”
― Dore Ashton

“Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.”
― Berenice Abbott

“I still have a photo, taken ... by Eugen Bavcar, a Slovenian photographer -who is blind.”
― Jacques Bonnet

“The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.”
― Thomas Merton

“Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
― William Morris

“Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.”
― Guy Davenport

“It is a fine thing when a man who thoroughly understands a subject is unwilling to open his mouth.”
― Yoshida Kenkō

“Lives do not have plots, only biographies do.”
― Guy Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus: And Other Papers on Literature and Art

“There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.”
― Elizabeth David

“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Critics make pipi on music and think they help it grow.”
― Andre Gedalge

“I am in the smallest room of the house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.”
― Max Reger

“Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.”
― Barnett Newman

“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”
― Jane Austen

“Show yourself more human than critical and your pleasure will increase.”
― Domenico Scarlatti

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein

“Russell Edson: The things we took for granted do not take us so.”
― Russell edson

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
― Robertson Davies

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“A book doesn't come alive until it is being read.”
― Kevin Ansbro