All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

A culture that does not teach prayer soon runs mad with desire.

The Bible said, as Chris quoted one memorable day, there was a time foreverything. I figured my time for happiness was just ahead, waitingfor me.

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

The trick in life is to find out where you belong. Once you find out where you belong, you will be happy there.

Live in the present as if the future is going to become the past that you have changed.

Thatʹs a dangerous look,ʺ said Dimitri, giving me a brief glance before returning his eyes to the road. ʺWhat look?ʺ I asked innocently. ʺThe one that says you just got some idea.

Better to try understanding the sun than a woman.

But as a young kid, I never did, really have an ambition to be a farmer. I never thought, gee, I would like to farm, and I want to raise these crops. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do.

When you feel totally alone in your thoughts and feelings, there's someone out there who is going through what you went through, even if it's the strangest, weirdest thing you could think of.

Perfection in war lies in so sapping your opponents will that he surrenders without fighting.