Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.

Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung

there's two kinds of folk in the world, just like there's two kinds of life in a seed. Something sends one kind up to hunt its food in the light and air, and sends the other kind down into the earth to make the roots.

It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one.

For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.

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."

None but the ignorant can be bored by life. To the lovers of learning, life is pure adventure shared with adventurers.