To be alive is to take risks; to be always safe and secure is death.

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.