Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26th, 1911 – February 25th, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. He is considered one of the foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

At age 33 Williams became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. It was the first of several successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). In 1979, four years before his death, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Below we list words of wisdom from Tennessee Williams.

“You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.” 

“Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?” 

“Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn’t love you.”

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”

“Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.”  

“Physical beauty is passing – a transitory possession – but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart – I have all these things – aren’t taken away but grow! Increase with the years!”

“Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.” 

“Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families” 

“If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anyone else?”

“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.” 

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” 

“The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.” 

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.” 

“There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.” 

“There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.” 

“To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.” 

“Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.”

“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!” 

“I don’t want realism. I want magic!” 

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.” 

“Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.” 

“The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.” 

“Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.” 

“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.”

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.” 

“Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.”

“Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.” 

“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” 

“Vanity, fear, desire, competition – all such distortions within our own egos – condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.” 

“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” 

“We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.” 

“Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.” 

“Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.” 

“We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us. Just tell the story and go on to the next one. All of us are full of stories the world might want to hear.” 

“I don’t believe in ‘original sin.’ I don’t believe in ‘guilt.’ I don’t believe in villains or heroes – only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.”

“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.” 


Copyright © 2026 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo 

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Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, and author. One of the most influential figures in 20th-century classical music, he served as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969, composed the score for West Side Story, and created groundbreaking works such as Candide, Chichester Psalms, and his three symphonies. Through his Young People’s Concerts on television, lectures, and books like The Joy of Music, Bernstein brought classical music to millions, making it accessible and exciting to new generations.

The composer Aaron Copland, Bernstein’s mentor, said of him: “Lenny is the ideal teacher—his enthusiasm is contagious, his knowledge profound, and his love for music boundless.” Below, we list some words of wisdom from Leonard Bernstein, drawn from his lectures, interviews, writings, and public statements.

“To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”

“I think that what you’ve got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and make a judgment about it.”

“The gift of creativity is that it is a gift to others as well as to oneself.”

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

“The best way to know a thing is to be part of it.”

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”

“The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close one’s eyes to reality—but that is the coward’s way.”

“Faith is not certainty; it is the courage to live with uncertainty.”

“The only way I have of knowing I’ve done any good is by being told.”

“A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested. A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.”

“Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”

“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”

“This joy of discovery is one of the things that makes music so exciting.”

“The point of all this is that we are living in a time of tremendous change, and the only way to survive is to be open to change.”

“Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.”

“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

“Music … can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”

“Ambiguity is the very essence of an artist.”

“This is the moment of truth for the artist: when he must decide whether to go on or to stop.”

“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unencumbered with ideas, unburdened by the need to explain itself.”

“In music, everything must be at once clear and mysterious.”

“The only honest art is that which is created out of necessity.”

“Any composer’s writing is autobiographical.”

“Art always mirrors the society in which it is created.”

“Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.”

“The joy and suffering of those who create are the same joy and suffering of those who listen.”

“Music is the one form of communication that can reach everyone, regardless of language or culture.”


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Copyright © 2026 Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo 

Truman Capote (September 30th, 1924 – August 25th, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his novels and plays are literary classics.

He was planning to become a writer at eight years old and began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of “Miriam” in 1945 attracted the attention of Random House publisher. He achieved widespread acclaim with Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966). Capote spent six years writing the latter.

Below we list some words of wisdom by Truman Capote.

“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody,” she said. “But it’s customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”

“Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.”

“It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.”

“You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.”

“Most people don’t find their creativity. There are more unsung geniuses that don’t even know they have great talent.”

“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

“All human life has its seasons and cycles, and no one’s personal chaos can be permanent. Winter, after all, gives way to spring and summer, though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, and that summer, but they do, and always.”

“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”

“The brain may take advice, but not the heart.”

“Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”

“There is only one unpardonable sin–deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.”

“A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.”

“A man who doesn’t dream is like a man who doesn’t sweat. He stores up a lot of poison.”

“If you weren’t here, if you could be anywhere you wanted to be, doing anything you wanted to do, where would you be and what would you be doing?”

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”

“The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.”

“Actually, I think friendship and love are exactly the same thing.”

“Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past.”

“I remember things the way they should have been.”

“Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.”

“He loved her, he loved her, and until he’d loved her she had never minded being alone.”

“You call yourself a free spirit, a “wild thing,” and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

“Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.”

“Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.”

“Are the dead as lonesome as the living?”

“Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.”

“I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough.”

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.”

“It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.”

“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”

“There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.”

“When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.”

“The better the actor, the more stupid he is.”

“How do I look so young? Quite simple: a complete vegetable diet, 12 hours sleep a night, and lots and lots of make-up.”

Copyright © 2026 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo 

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Paul Cézanne (January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of 20th-century abstract art and modern painting. Often called the “father of modern art,” Cézanne bridged Impressionism and Cubism through his innovative use of color, form, and structure. His most famous series include Mont Sainte-Victoire landscapes, still lifes with apples, and portraits of bathers. Largely unrecognized during much of his life, his persistent exploration of perception and geometry profoundly influenced artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and Braque.

Pablo Picasso famously declared, “Cézanne is the father of us all.”

Below, we list some words of wisdom from Cézanne, drawn from his letters, conversations, and recorded statements.

“The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.”

“Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience.”

“Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of knowledge.”

“Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.”

“Keep good company, read good books, live in the light of the mind.”

“I want to make of impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums.”

“The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.”

“One had to see nature as no one had seen it before.”

“Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.”

“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.”

“An optical impression is presented to us as an enigma.”

“Art is a harmony parallel with nature.”

“The artist must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time.”

“I am more a primitive of my art than a master.”

“The secret of drawing is to correct constantly.”

“I am always making discoveries, either of color or form.”

“The landscape thinks itself in me, I am its consciousness.”

“Painting is damned difficult — you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.”

“I paint as if some blind man was looking over my shoulder.”

“The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist.”

“One must never let the brush become more important than the painting.”

“The contour eludes me.”

“I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.”

“I am the primitive of the way I have taken.”

“One should not say that I have painted apples, but that I have painted red.”

“Painting means thinking with your brush.”

“The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.”

“Optics, that is to say the knowledge of the general effect of light, governs everything.”

“I have sworn to die painting.”

“The most important thing in painting is to find your own walk.”

“When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”

“For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.”

“We live in a rainbow of chaos.”

“Right now a moment of time is passing by! Capture its reality in paint!”

“Everything we see falls apart, vanishes. Nature is always the same, but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence.”

“Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones.”

“An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all.”

“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.”

“There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.”

“I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant.”

“Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct; everything in nature is coloured.”

“To my mind one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.”

“The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.”

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Copyright © 2026 Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo 

Nelle Harper Lee (April 28th, 1926 – February 19th, 2016) was an American writer whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic. She was good friends with Truman Capote and helped with his research for the book In Cold Blood.

To Kill a Mockingbird is loosely based on her experiences growing up in Monroeville, Alabama. The novel deals with race and class in the Deep South during the 1930s, as perceived through the eyes of two children.

Lee received many accolades and honorary degrees for her contribution to literature.

Below we list some words of wisdom by Nelle Harper Lee.

“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”— Harper Lee, quoted in Newquist, 1964

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

“As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, ‘I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.”

“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.”

“It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike–in the second place, folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.”

“Don’t you study about other folks’ business till you take care of your own.”

“You see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that’s the way I want to live.”

“Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.”

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.”

“Things are always better in the morning.”

“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.”

“It’s better to be silent than to be a fool.”

“Things are never as bad as they seem.”

“Try fighting with your head for a change… it’s a good one, even if it does resist learning.”

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”

“There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”

“We’re paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It’s that simple.”

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.”

“Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?”

“With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.”

“There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.”

“You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

Copyright © 2026 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo 

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24th, 1896 – December 21st, 1940), known as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist. He is most known for his novels about the excess of the Jazz Age. 

When Fitzgerald died, he and the critics who knew his work thought it was a failure. His New York Times obituary deemed his work forever tied to an era “when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession”.

Within a year after his death, Edmund Wilson finished Fitzgerald’s incomplete fifth novel The Last Tycoon using Fitzgerald’s notes. He also included The Great Gatsby within the edition. The Great Gatsby gained momentum when it was distributed free to American soldiers serving overseas. 

By 1960, thirty-five years after the novel’s original publication, it was selling 100,000 copies per year, and The New York Times editorialist called it a masterwork of American literature. By the 21st century, The Great Gatsby had sold millions of copies, and it’s now required reading in many high school and college classes.

Below we list words of wisdom from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“The greatest profound pain is caused by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.”

“For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.”

“To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.”

“She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.”

“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.”

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”

“You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.”

“And in the end, we were all just humans…Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.”

“Intelligence is measured by a person’s ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.”

“Before you criticize others, remember, they may not have had the same opportunities in life as you have had.”

“…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true.”

“Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.”

“It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

“I never blame failure – there are too many complicated situations in life – but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.”

“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”

“No matter how low you go, there’s always an unexplored basement.”

“Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things…My courage is faith-faith in the eternal resilience of me-that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide.”

“Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”

“Don’t forget who you are and where you come from.”

“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”

“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”

“Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.”

“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”

“Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

“It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.”

Copyright © 2026 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo 

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Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical brilliance, flamboyant personality, and dreamlike, often shocking imagery. His most famous works include The Persistence of Memory, Christ of Saint John of the Cross, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony. A master painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and writer, Dalí turned his entire life into a work of art, blending genius with provocation and forever expanding the boundaries of imagination.

André Breton, founder of Surrealism, once declared (before their bitter split), “Dalí is surrealism itself.”

Below, we list some unforgettable words of wisdom from Dalí, drawn from his books, interviews, and public declarations.

“Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.”

“A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”

“The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”

“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”

“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.”

“Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.”

“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: it is either good or bad.”

“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.”

“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them.”

“I am not strange. I am just not normal.”

“The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments.”

“An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.”

“Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.”

“Let my enemies devour each other.”

“People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.”

“There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”

“Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.”

“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely subjective and personal forces within themselves.”

“I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.”

“Beauty should be edible, or not at all.”

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”

“What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.”

“Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.”

“Since I don’t smoke, I decided to grow a mustache—it is better for the health.”

“Genius has to pass through the madman’s throat.”

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Copyright © 2025 Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo 

Ernest Hemingway (July 21st, 1899 – July 2nd, 1961) was an American writer and journalist. He wrote seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction books, some of which are classics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for his novel The Old Man and the Sea.

The Sun Also Rises, his first novel, was published in 1926. His experiences during the war led to A Farewell to Arms, his 1929 novel.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Ernest Hemingway.

“Develop a built-in bullshit detector.”

“Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

“The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.”

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.”

“Life breaks all of us but some of us get stronger in the broken places.”

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”

“Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.”

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

“I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you’re yet to be.”

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.”

“Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, every thing will get better and sun will shine brighter then ever.”

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”

“Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.”

“You must be prepared to work always without applause.”

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

“Being against evil doesn’t make you good.”

“The only thing that can ruin a good day is people.”

“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

“To be successful in writing, use short sentences.”

“When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.”

“Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.”

“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

“To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don’t let it.”

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.”

“I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.”

“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

“Be fully in the moment, open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.”

“The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire.”

“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is”

“No one you love is ever truly lost.”

“America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.”

“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.”

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”

“How little we know of what there is to know.”

“Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.”

“Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home.”

Copyright © 2025 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo 

Our FREE Spiritual Detox Script can help you get rid of toxic energy and help you make the most of your life. http://spiritualgrowthnow.com/script/ 

Learn more about spiritual myths, meditation and how to use it to your advantage, and much more with our Direct Your Destiny e-Package: http://spiritualgrowthnow.com/directyourdestiny/ 

Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) was an Italian novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose imaginative and intellectually playful works reshaped modern literature. His masterpieces include Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and Cosmicomics. Calvino blended fantasy, philosophy, and linguistic precision to explore the nature of storytelling, memory, and human experience. A master of fable and metafiction, he remains one of the most beloved and influential voices of 20th-century literature.

Writer Gore Vidal praised Calvino, saying, “He was the most original and delightful of modern fabulists, a magician of language who made the impossible seem inevitable.

Below, we list some words of wisdom from Calvino, drawn from his novels, essays, and lectures.

“Seek not to know who you are, but to know what you are.”

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.”

“Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

“The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, ‘I read, therefore it writes.’”

“What matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it.”

“A human being becomes human not through the abstract exercise of thought, but through the concrete act of living.”

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret.”

“One reads thousands of books to write one.”

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”

“The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.”

“Every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shrouded in the fog of forgetfulness.”

“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”

“The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a clear vision of the world such as the novelist’s.”

“Every time I write a book, I am trying to answer a question I don’t know how to ask.”

“In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.”

“The more one is aware of the fragility of things, the more one loves them.”

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities.”

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

“The book I’m looking for is the one that gives me the sense of the world after I’ve finished it.”

“Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”

“Every morning I tell myself: ‘Today you will be a man.’ And every evening I say: ‘Tomorrow, perhaps.’”

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.”

“What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”

“Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them.”

“Reading is a possession, a conquest, a continuous act of appropriation.”

“The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here.”

Our FREE Spiritual Detox Script can help you get rid of toxic energy and help you make the most of your life. http://spiritualgrowthnow.com/script/ 

Learn more about spiritual myths, meditation and how to use it to your advantage, and much more with our Direct Your Destiny e-Package: http://spiritualgrowthnow.com/directyourdestiny/ 

Copyright © 2025 Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo