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.

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

Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice

A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

To an eagle or to an owl or to a rabbit, man must seem a masterful and yet a forlorn animal; he has but two friends. In his almost universal unpopularity he points out, with pride, that these two are the dog and the horse. He believes, with an innocence peculiar to himself, that they are equally proud of this alleged confraternity. He says, 'Look at my two noble friends -- they are dumb, but they are loyal.' I have for years suspected that they are only tolerant.

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

Success breeds confidence.