“In dreams I do not recollect that state of feeling so common when awake, of thinking of one subject and looking at another.” — Coleridge

“In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain.” — Dostoevsky

“In a dream you are never eighty.” — Anne Sexton

“The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” — Heraclitus

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.” — Cicero

“The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.” — Democritus

“My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon.” — Sydney Smith

“The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again.” — John Locke, letter to Samuel Bold, May 16, 1699

“I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.” — Montesquieu

“It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.” — Aeschylus

“All wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common ignorance.” — Montaigne

“I don’t believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn’t treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.” — Walt Disney

“One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.” — Nietzsche

“How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.” — Gioacchino Rossini

“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.” — W.H. Auden

“People are wrong when they say that the opera isn’t what it used to be. It is what it used to be — that’s what’s wrong with it!” — Noël Coward