Vanity is a vital aid to nature: completely and absolutely necessary to life. It is one of nature's ways to bind you to the earth.

Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow.

Knowing it can always get worse, I try to be grateful for whatever good I have.

I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.

All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

Work is the only only only remedy for life: for happiness, for interest, for stability, for security. Hard, willed work. Oh work!

The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like the lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely.

It's not what happens to us that defines us. It's what we choose to do with what happens to us that defines us.

I am possessed by love and have no options.

Music is the unspoken language that can convey feelings more accurately than talking ever could.

Never tell a mother how she has to raise her children and give no advice over their schooling, health or nutrition if you are not asked to.

It was very difficult to write about my own country, because I have always been the outsider looking in.

I like it when science and devotion find places of intersection.

History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.

We're not sane enough yet to enter space until we learn to live together in peace on Earth.

Power is neither male nor female.

If the Chinese business community takes the Declaration of Human Rights, core labor standards, and environmental standards seriously, the government of China will take them far more seriously, too.

Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest

This is how memories are; what seems so clear and unforgettable at one moment vanishes like steam the next.

The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.