The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature.

So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

One's ribs shouldn't be prison bars.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.

The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.

I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.

What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?" Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's.

But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block...

Anna would like you, he thinks, looking into her face. Anna would like you.

I find a certain comfort, " confesses Marinus, "in humanity's helplessness.

There is no substantive difference between being stabbed to death in the living beating heart with a physical knife and feeling the plunging stabbing pain of betrayal.

Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.

You cannot limit yourself to one area of specialized craft. Instead, regardless of craft, you have to charge all forms of expression that lead to the community, to other people, with meaning.

Without an end to the burning of fossil fuels, coal especially, most of us will live shorter lives. I'm hopeful, but very, very concerned.

Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.

The limitations that we can see of the sexual description of reality are very apparent. Very few men attain enlightenment, even fewer women.

Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.

Every time we go to sleep, it's a rehearsal of the day when our eyes will ultimately close and we wake up on the side of eternity.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.