“The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.”

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.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.

The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I’ve got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the answer.

The answer to one is the answer to all. Government by ‘the people’ is expedient or it is not. If it is expedient, then obviously all the people must be included.

Are you saying that the assistant had the answers all along, he just wasn’t telling anyone?

We forget that our parents were children, too. Let’s get to know them as little ones. Perhaps we’ll find the answer why they behave now the way they do.

The whole thing of life and all the answers to everything are in one divine law, Karma action and reaction.

The essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer, not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.