In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect ...

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.

Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

A man is born alone and dies alone and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.

He has a profound respect for old age. Especially when it's bottled.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

I've an enormous respect for my mother who at the age of 39 raised three children, and I grew up with my grandmother in the household. And so it was a really strong household of women - my poor brother! It was great growing up with so many generations of women.

The older generation had greater respect for land than science. But we live in an age when science, more than soil, has become the provider of growth and abundance. Living just on the land creates loneliness in an age of globality.

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.