“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.”

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

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.

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.

Fortunately, the courts discharged me every time after they understood what I had done.

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

The Islamic ethic is that if God has given you the capacity or good fortune to be a privileged individual in society, you have a moral responsibility to society.

The man who is in the highest state of prosperity, and who thinks his fortune is most secure, knows not if it will remain unchanged till the evening.

I had much rather be adorned by beauty of character than by jewels. Jewels are the gift of fortune, character comes from within.

Wrapt up in error is the human mind, And human bliss is ever insecure; Know we what fortune yet remains behind? Know we how long the present shall endure?

Fortune helps the brave.

Good fortune is the greatest of blessings, but good counsel comes next, and the lack of it destroys the other also.