Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.

It is a juvenile notion that a society needs a lofty purpose and a shining vision to achieve much. Both in the market place and on the battlefield men who set their hearts on toys have often displayed unequal initiative and drive. And one must be ignorant of the creative process to look for a close correspondence between motive and achievement in the world of thought and imagination.

There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.

Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.