Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.

nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.

When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace of things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the procession of the equinoxes, the dances of Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift runners at Olympia.

Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are of the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of an athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy.

In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.