Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof - that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.

The proper study of mankind is books.

The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.

Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man--a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry.