One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

For what we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.

The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.