“Of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.”

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.

In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.

You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can’t function without it.

If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it.

Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.

I look forward and see myself look back.

It is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.

The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.

It has been women who have breathed gentleness and care into the hard progress of humankind.

Where there is love of medicine, there is love of humankind.

I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind.

How then shall we live? Let us live lightly as a feather. How much shall we give? Let us give everything, together One heart, one mind, all humankind… I volunteer.

My views about God come from my dad. Dad told me that he believed Nature, which to him included humankind, to be so beautiful, so magnificent, that there had to be something behind it all.

Only in His presence shall we learn that the glory of humankind is not in its will to power but in its power of compassion.