“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”

May you live all the days of your life.

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it.

Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.

There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.

Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.

The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora’s box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.

There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

I didn’t do any of the crimes that the man two blocks over at the White House is responsible for.

Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, “Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!”

We need to block out the outside world; we need to disbelieve anything that would doubt us, because everyone will doubt us if we allow them that space.

When we are in our studios, in our private space.

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

I was here, and I loaded a shotgun on Independence Day, but I didn’t kill anybody.

Attachment is the strongest block to realization.

Society expects man to be a passive social animal who believes like the People of the Field in “Jurgen” that “to do what you always have done” and “what is expected of you” are the twin rules of life.