To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.

A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.

Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.

Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.

Human beings can't bear silence. It would mean that they would bear themselves.

You can never have for yourself someone who isn't on good terms with himself.

Reading leads to good character development.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

We need images and myths through which we can see who we are and what we might become.

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

The butterflies will be jangling.

If you can't have faith in what is held up to you for faith, you must find things to believe in yourself, for a life without faith in something is too narrow a space to live.

It is surely important that the differences between coma, deep sleep, being under anesthesia, on the one hand, and being alert on the other, all involve changes in the brain.

I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour - and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.

If you didn't join for the girls, choose another profession.