“We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.”

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.

After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.

Woe to that man who runs when God has not sent him; and woe to him who refuses to run, or who ceases to run, when God has sent him.

I expect and hope that orthomolecular medicine, within the next five to ten years, will cease to be a specialty in medicine and that all physicians will be using nurition as an essential tool in treating disease.

I would say about individuals, A Individual dies when they cease to to be surprised. I am surprised every morning when I see the sunshine again.

War shall cease between nations, and by the will of God the Most Great Peace shall come; the world will be seen as a new world, and all men will live as brothers.

I beseech you, one and all, to add your prayers to mine to the end that war and bloodshed cease, and that love, friendship, peace and unity reign in the world.

Hell is the place where one has ceased to hope.

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.