Fate forces its way to the powerful and violent. With subservient obedience it will assume for years dependency on one individual:Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, because it loves the elemental human being who grows to resemble it, the intangible element. Sometimes, and these are the most astonishing moments in world history, the thread of fate falls into the hands of a complete nobody but only for a twitching minute.

We can't forever be spending our lives paying for political follies that never gave us anything but always took from us, and I amcontent with the narrowest metes and bounds provided I have peace and quiet for work.

But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.

Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.

Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.

Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.