“Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.”

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries.

And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?

Something doesn’t start at its usual time. Something doesn’t happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.

We’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

Memory at last has what I sought.

I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.

And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.

Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character; and then he is never made radically better for its influence.

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.

Make the world better.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

Man is not made better by being degraded.

I was taught to think the next week or month or year will only get better than it is today. So I just keep waiting to see how great it will get!