Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Mr. Keating: Carpe Diem! Sieze the day!

Seize the day. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.

I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.

It is a pity to make a mystery out of what should most easily be understood. There is nothing occult about the thought that all things maybe made well or made ill. A work of art is a well-made thing - that is all. It may be a well-made statue of a well-made chair or a well-made book. Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself that is good. Most simply and generally, Art may be thought of as "The Well Doing of What Needs Doing."

When we approach love and creativity with the level of conviction that the powers-that-be in the world today are approaching hatred and destruction, then and only then will we have a chance.

Against Him those women sin who torment their skin with potions, stain their cheeks with rouge and extend the line of their eyes with black coloring. Doubtless they are dissatisfied with God's plastic skill. In their own persons they convict and censure the Artificer of all things.

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.

I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.