The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.

For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.

If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.

I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.

We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.