Calvin: Life's a lot more fun when you aren't responsible for your actions.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you’ll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you’ll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

As "Calvin and Hobbes" went on, the writing pushed the drawings into greater complexity. One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what's going on in Calvin's head.

People pay more attention when they think you’re up to something.

Childhood is for spoiling adulthood.

Let's say that life is this square of the sidewalk. We are born at this crack and we die at that crack. Now we find ourselves somewhere inside the square and in the process of walking outside of it. Suddenly, we realize our time in here is fleeting. Is our quick experience here pointless? Does anything we say or do in here really matter? Have we done anything important? Have we been happy? Have we made the most of these precious few footsteps?

I was reading about how countless species are being pushed toward extinction by man's destruction of forests. . . . Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.