It’s a funny thing about life: If you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it.

Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

Dying is nothing. What is terrible is not to live.

The heights by great men reached and kept Where not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.

Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best.

Half-finished work generally proves to be labor lost.

Unsuccessful people make decisions based on current situations. Successful people make decisions based on where they want to be.

How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.

Some people die at age 25 and aren't buried until they are 75.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take for better, for worse, as his portion; that, though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really man it.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.

One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.