“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

Don’t fight forces, use them.

Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.

Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

Tension is the great integrity.

Man knows so much and does so little.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.

I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

Jesus Christ, Lord of all things! You see my heart, you know my desires.

He knows what he speaks of, what he brings with him and what he promises; and he can convey it to those who know it not.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.

One of the most powerful sayings I have come across is by Imam ash-Shafi’I, “My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.”

I believe we are all part of the spiritual heart. We all come from that place of oneness, so that place in us that knows love, that knows connection, hurts.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

They only go after what they know they can get.