“A disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.”

Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.

Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.

Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

As we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. … We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.

Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.

Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.

Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

Design, whether it’s on your body or in your home, is the same thing. It’s mixing different colors, different textures, and unexpected patterns – elements that you wouldn’t often put together in an interesting way.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.

Soccer is a continuous game, rugby is a continuous game, but for the physical elements that are involved in playing a football game and the number of plays that you play, I don’t know that it was ever intended to be a continuous game.

The paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude – all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.