Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!

In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.

By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.