“Whatever man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself.”

Most people can’t understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don’t notice whether it’s passing quickly or slowly.

What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.

Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.

Belonging to oneself–the whole essence of life lies in that.

No matter how often you knock at nature’s door, she won’t answer in words you can understand–for Nature is dumb. She’ll vibrate and moan like a violin, but you mustn’t expect a song.

Love isn’t actually a feeling at all–it’s an illness, a certain condition of body and soul…. Usually it takes possession of someone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will–just like cholera or a fever.

That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.

I’m incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn’t want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I’d never experienced it.

It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.

I was afraid of looking into my heart…afraid of thinking seriously about anything…I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to admit to myself that I was not loved.

Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.

Even nightingales can’t be fed on fairy tales.

Go and try to disprove death. Death will disprove you, and that’s all!

He was the soul of politeness to everyone — to some with a hint of aversion, to others with a hint of respect.

I will do my best to reduce the price of oil to expand the life span of oil at least for two decades or three decades.

I don’t that they’re very keen to reduce the price of oil. The consumers are those who are the victims so I think that the producers, the governments, some of them, they’re enjoying the high revenue that they get.

The United States worked very hard to reduce 80 percent of Iraqi debt.

Reduce the number of your opponent’s shots;

We must either reduce the number of our engagements or increase the number of our troops.

The goal of scientific physicians in their own science … is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics therefore apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,

Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism would reduce the life of emotions to freezing point.