Life is more than great sex and a nice car. Well, yeah. But not a lot more.

True insanity, as frightening as it might be, gives a sort of obliviousness to the chaos in a life. People who commit suicide are struggling to order their existence, and when they see it's a losing...

The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe.

This dark world of Humanity, this shadowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the...

People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

As Buddha said, All that we are is determined by our thoughts.

As soon as another person becomes important to us, so that we feel in our lives the gravitational pull of his existence, we are to a certain extent astonished by his individuality. From time to time...

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way...

The symptom of love is when some of the chemicals inside you go bad. So there must be something in love because your chemicals do tell you something.

For example, Professor Morris Raphael Cohen was a very distinguished philosopher who challenged conventional wisdom in a Yiddish accent. With the diversity and poverty of its students, City College...

He wanted to be a universal man … and I suppose that isn't possible now. He belongs in fifteenth-century Italy. This age doesn't suit him.

Without guilt or remorse, shame was an empty emotion. Indeed, shame would not be shame.

Even when there's no interest on either side, one's coordination completely disappears in the presence of beauty. {Abigail's daughter, Jen}

How many demons and people are enslaved here? {Jericho} Define slavery. {Asmodeus} Kept against their will. {Jericho} Good definition. Counting me? {Asmodeus} Why not? {Jericho} Probably a couple of...

With all due respect to Israel's primo king, David and I are not on the same page here. I'm more with the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science was coming into...

LATER THAT DAY, in the evening, Nadia's time, the sun having slipped below her horizon, it was morning in the San Diego, California, locality of La Jolla, where an old man lived by the sea, or rather...

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

"What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!" "And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!"

That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super - powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have...

The thanks of a weak one are but of little value," he muttered, "but you have them, for truly, in this past week, little but scraps have come my way - and for all my body is small, yet is my appetite...

'..then he added, as if requiring a response to his own remark, 'Probably the greater the difference, the greater the similarity, and the greater the similarity, the greater the difference,' at that...

Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us.

The survival of man depends less on the perfection of the senses than might be believed. His reasoning ability has freed him from numerous efforts and obligations, so many of his faculties have been...

Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that...

It was like noticing the sun. You couldn't help but see it, to turn to face the heat of it, to bask in the glory of it. But often when the sun is high in the sky, the moon is up there, too. A dim...

It's like zen. Only not as subtle.

The law, we are told, is what makes us men under God instead of beasts in the ditch

My chalice intoxicates me.

Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us. Wanting more is to lose this and to be unhappy.