Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.

What seems new is only new to us.

The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members

Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break.

There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.

No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. "And relationships," he had told her, "contained the essential meaning of life."

you seem to grieve for what is not so ... and there is no need to let your heart run ahead into evils that may never come.