Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.

To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.