You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.

the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing

In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.

We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.

The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.