Victorian quotes

A culture is as rich and capable of surviving as it has imaginative artists.

One of the fruits of longevity is establishing a reputation you may not deserve.

Some people feel like you need to have a very specialized understanding of music to have the authority to talk about it. They are such good directors that it's perfectly possible to have conceptual and directorial and storytelling conversations about music without needing to know all the technical pieces.

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

Imagine a German as president of the European Commission. If he or she goes to some particular country and says do this or that, it won't be very well received. The president quickly ends up being the evil German. But if the president is elected by and controlled by 700 representatives from all EU countries, that legitimizes him or her in a very different way.

I speak Mandarin and can read and write a little. I took a few classes at Harvard to get better in my reading and writing skills.

I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.

Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.

I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.