We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.
Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.
For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.
The exterior cannot do without the interior since it is from this, as from life, that it derives much of its inspiration and character.
So much of my writing derives from these questions that I ask myself - things that are utterly beyond my personal set of experiences - and it's my attempt to try to... understand, to sort of break out of my own consciousness, you know, the limitations of my own life.
Just as Divinity descends in a certain manner, to the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature, just as by means of a life resplendent in natural things one rises to the life that presides over them.
If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians.
All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations.
All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations. Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me - I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
I think if I heard someone else talking about their life, describing all the problems I've had, they'd look like they were through. Done. But there's something about me - I'm smiling. Those things are really not bad enough to put me in a slump. I'm smiling with the opportunity to wake up every morning.
I really love baseball. The guys and the game, and I love the challenge of describing things. The only thing I hate - and I know you have to be realistic and pay the bills in this life - is the loneliness on the road.
I did a very stupid diet where you have three food groups, and you never eat them together. It's so bloody tedious; I'm losing the will to live just describing it. I managed to stay very thin because you spent your life wandering around starving hungry looking for a chickpea to go with a chicken leg.
Sportswriting is fascinating - descriptions of the opponents and the details of an event in which someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. Life is much longer and more complicated, and the outcomes are less clear-cut.
Music is basically melody, harmony, and rhythm. But people can do much more with music than that. It can be very descriptive in all kinds of ways, all walks of life.
We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.
True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.
One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.
I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled, and thanks to money and fame, I didn't have to go far to find them.
I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and these are not things that ever deserved to die.
