I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.

I sometimes think there is a dimension beyond the four of experience and Einstein: insight, that fifth dimension which promises to liberate us from bondage to the long, imperfect past

Why did God give me two ears and one mouth? So that I will hear more and talk less.

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.

Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.

Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.