“In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.”

Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.

“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.

People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.

I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.

That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.

It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.

As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.

All parts of the body which have a function, if used in moderation and exercised in labors in which each is accustomed, become thereby healthy, well developed and age more slowly, but if unused they become liable to disease, defective in growth and age quickly.

The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

Britain and the US remain the Wild West for ideas, where pioneers push each other towards ever greater heights in the white heat of free enterprise.

My first child is going to be the oldest sibling to the next kid, and that may change with each and every year. I’m looking forward to how one baby influences the other, and to my family as a whole, to every single chapter.

Your nobility must estimate how much of you Was put into each hour of your daily work

Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.