If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.

It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.

Children notice things first, people later.

Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.

The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.