What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.

Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.

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

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.