Quotations

"Ignorance is the parent of fear."

— Herman Melville, American novelist, born 1819

"Good photos to good people and from a good person."

— Rebecca Menashe, American artist, born 1979 (at age five, when asked for a byline on her father's work)

"Ever since I began to compose, I have remained true to my starting principle: not to write a page because no matter what public, or what pretty girl wanted it to be thus or thus; but to write solely as I myself thought best, and as it gave me pleasure."

— Felix Mendelssohn, German composer, born 1809

"Never mind, put any book on the piano, and someone can turn from time to time, so I need not look as though I played by heart."

— Felix Mendelssohn, German composer, born 1809

"My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to specter, from specter to plant from plant to galaxy. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world."

— Ana Mendieta, Cuban-American sculptor, born 1948

"A society without its dreamers can never be free."

— Yehudi Menuhin, American-Swiss violinist, born 1916

"A dream is unrehearsed."

— Yehudi Menuhin, American-Swiss violinist, born 1916

"Music lives and breathes to tell us who we are and what we face. It is a path between ourselves and the infinite."

— Yehudi Menuhin, American-Swiss violinist, born 1916

"Always be more than you appear and never appear to be more than you are."

— Angela Merkel, German politician, born 1954

"Tis true, my form is something odd, but blaming me, is blaming God. Could I create myself anew I would not fail in pleasing you."

— Joseph Merrick, English man with deformities, born 1862

"Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone."

— Thomas Merton, Anglo-American Catholic mystic, born 1915

"What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world. Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."

— Thomas Merton, Anglo-American Catholic mystic, born 1915

"We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen."

— Thomas Merton, Anglo-American Catholic mystic, born 1915

"The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world."

— Thomas Merton, Anglo-American Catholic mystic, born 1915