The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity, a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

Knowing makes all the difference... It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

The clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital.

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.