I do think that history lived, and a life lived, is as much to do with the birdsong you heard that morning as any great event.
The thinking of creative and successful men is never exerted in any direction other than that intended. That is why great men produce such a prodigious amount of work, seemingly without effort and without fatigue. The amount of work such men leave to posterity is amazing.
There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.
The purpose of life is to amount to something and have it make some difference that you lived at all.
We have a finite amount of time. Whether short or long, it doesn't matter. Life is to be lived.
Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.
Inside was where she lived, physically and mentally. She resided in the horn of plenty of her own prodigious mind, fertilized by inexhaustible curiosity.
Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.
All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
And in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live - and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.
No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically.
But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning — for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
A life lived of choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived of chance is a life of unconscious creation.
Every successful man or great genius has three particular qualities in common. The most conspicuous of these is that they all produce a prodigious amount of work. The second is that they never know fatigue. And the third is that their minds grow more brilliant as they grow older, instead of less brilliant. Great men's lives begin at forty, where the mediocre man's life ends. The genius remains an ever-flowing fountain of creative achievement until the very last breath he draws.
I've been through college, and I lived in a trailer park for five years. I've lived in the trenches of Maryland, and I've lived in the suburbs. I've seen all aspects of American life.
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.