That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that is has occurred within us.

Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.

Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.

At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure.

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.