Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.