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

Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.

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.

Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?

We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.

The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept, so do the timid, so do the mentally lazy – and so do all of us, more than we imagine.

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.