There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

We spend our time envying people whom we wouldn't wish to be.

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.

Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.

Kill one man, and you are murderer.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

To be adult is to be alone.

A man is not old as long as he is seeking something.

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

Dream anything hard enough, and it can be yours.

I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

hark, now hear the sailors cry, smell the sea, and feel the sky let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic...

Dip your fingers n the spring stream or lift your face to the summer rains. Listen for me in the winter wind I'll come back for you.

One of the few luxuries left is travel. And the aspect of travel that is luxurious is not the movement, but the being there.

Collecting is more than just buying objects.

I'd like to do something impossible rather than just something historical.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

Knowledge is the treasure of the mind, but discretion is the key to it, without which it is useless. The practical part of wisdom is the best.

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term