It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.

An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.

Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail.

I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension—the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds.

When it aims to express a love of the world it refuses to conceal the many reasons why the world is hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other, and to fail to love it is not to exist at all.

There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest of people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present.