“Nothing matters at all. Survival is the coin of the realm. Time is a river with banks.”

There is no truth which cannot be given in fifty words; the truth is always concise.

“Events,” I say to the Captain, “events control our lives, although we have no understanding of them nor do they have any motivation.

Ruthven surmised that he had hit upon some of the central deceptions which had wrecked him and reduced him and so many of his colleagues to this condition.

Everything is blind chance, happenstance, occurrence; in an infinite universe anything can happen. After the fact we find reasons.

Once you start rewriting, you’re not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it.

To surmise was not to conquer, of course; he was as helpless as ever but there was a dim liberation in seeing how he had been lied to, and he felt that at least he could take one thing from the terrible years through which he had come: he was free of self-delusion.

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.

The sun was a pewter coin in a leaden sky.

great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions.

But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage.

The similarities among animals that are on the surface very different are no coincidence.

A war undertaken without sufficient monies has but a wisp of force. Coins are the very sinews of battles.

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

Capitalism and Bolshevism are the two sides of the same international Jewish coin.