Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.

... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.

it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.

We should all know this: that listening is not talking; [it] is the gifted and great role and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective, and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

There is that American pastime known as "kidding" - with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything.

Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.