"..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel."

“Be culturally literate, because if you don't have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you're not going to express anything to anybody else.”

“There is the tendency to place ourselves and our ambitions at the center of our lives. This is very human, but it is not Christian.”

“I'm a jacket man. And if I'm without one, I am kind of seriously disabled. I don't know how to operate in shirt sleeves.”

“Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!”

“To stand in the presence of God, that is what the Gospel is. The Gospel is not primarily about forgiveness. It’s not primarily about good feelings. It’s not primarily about power. All those things are byproducts, sparks. It’s primarily about the presence of God.”

“I never wanted this kind of life that Im still living.”

“I think art certainly is the vehicle for us to develop any new ideas, to be creative, to extend our imagination, to change the current conditions.”

Source : "Ai Weiwei 'Does Not Feel Powerful'". www.bbc.com. October 13, 2011.

“Versailles was a gulf into which the labor of France poured its earnings; and it was never full.”

Source : Francis Parkman, David Levin (1983). “France and England in North America: Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. A half-century of conflict. Montcalm and Wolfe”, p.853, Library of America