Humanity does not ask to be happy.It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it... Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, , but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

People love to hear the brag of the local boy, because they want him to be great, but the foreigner must deny that he has any outstanding virtue - this is what will endear him to the locals.

Thanks from keeping me from being a liar," said Nikolai. "What?" "About your having diarrhea." "For you I'd get dysentery." "Now that's friendship.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." -Taleswapper

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

None of us could be happy for long, doing nothing.

And yet.. even if you had been right, it would only have been by accident. A broken clock is right two times a day.