But the problem with crests is that they lead downhill. From the crest I can see all the rest of my years stretched out before me. And the view doesn't please me. I see only aging, diminishment,...

Do not create children until one is ready to be a creator and to spawn creators. It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in...

There is nothing that cannot be explained if one has access to a library with good reference books.

Once the troublesome mind begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work. But if you can surpass those thoughts,...

It is strange and also correct that intense emotions make us respond to earth-shattering news contrary to what logic dictates. They are the absolute value of human emotions; sometimes, happy events...

Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that's essential or inescapable {food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and...

Time - - when pursued like a bandit - - will behave like one; always remaining one country or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the...

I eat not because I want to, not because I have to overcome anything, not to prove myself to anyone, but because it's there. I eat because that's what people do. And somehow when the food is put in...

Stephen had just come from a class discussion in which several students believed that the right cup of herbal tea would save them from pain and sorrow. Well acquainted with pain and sorrow, Stephen...

They yearn for what they fear for.

He has a saying: he'll only believe what can be written on a postcard.

Our job is to create a sense of purpose!

The only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian.

One cannot look "objectively" at oneself and locate oneself in reality; and the task is to think this impossibility itself as an ontological fact, not only as an epistemological limitation. In other...

Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.

Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced. But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you...

When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of. It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.

All live to die, and rise to fall.

Time passed, worlds diverged.

Anything essential is invisible to the eye.

God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an...

Life we can't control, she thought. We must accept the cork we are and stay afloat, and bob gaily when we can. She

Tribal people get more out of life.

a tribe is nothing more than a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living.

Vaughn nodded. Lije steadied himself and looked into the woods. Never could abide no roof. Ours ain't the best, Vaughn said. Leaks come spring. Lije pointed at Venus faint above the distant ridge. The...

The philosopher is a perpetual beginner. This means that he accepts nothing as established from what men or scientists believe they know. This also means that philosophy itself is an ever-renewed...

Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing...

I asked: 'What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?' And I replied to quite another question: 'What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?' With the result that,...

I believed I had won the world in an hour and that I still didn't know I could lose it in a minute.

Abandon all patience, ye who enter beyond this door.