At some time during the process, {of writing} I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost I keep in my garage. A few months...

It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more. It's remembering Socrates' wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing.

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.

Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

Ridicule was a better defense than truth.

Do we miss not only the past but every future the lost past describes? Is that just the nature of missing? All the lost might - have - beens? The certainty that those uncertain futures are gone?

Mindy had explained that a lot of things had ghosts, not just people. Animals, machines, even things as vast as a paved - over forest or as humble as the smell of good cooking could leave traces of...

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that truly move the world are invisible.

Probably is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

Light in love is joy. Light in faith is hope. Light in compassion is mercy. Light in gratitude is contentment. Light in understanding is awareness. Light in intellect is discernment. Light in...

In the lowest Hell you find ignorance. In the lowest Heaven you find shrewdness.

Light gave birth to the existence. Existence gave birth to reality. Reality gave birth to eternity. Eternity gave birth to time. Time gave birth to life. The past gave birth to the future. The future...

... {W}e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth - filled man,...

Do gooders don't interest me. They are the least interesting people on the planet.

There were other ways to live. You could do something else, if you wanted. And if you had a reason.

For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have...

My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of...

It is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are...

The tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die an

If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they'd all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another's fur.

Cells became molecules - countless and complex and varied. The demarcation of one thing and another failed. There was only a community of molecules, shifting in a vast dance. And then the atoms that...

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty,...

Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.

Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.

This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the...

No one in their right mind would attempt to salvage it, but there were plenty of people not in their right mind. The world was full of them, more produced every minute.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we're distant and...

And while his mother's lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant - how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.