“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

You get born and you try this and you don’t know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people.

Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Civilization begins with distillation

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

Before we can pray, “Lord, Thy Kingdom come,” we must be willing to pray, “My Kingdom go.”

I have this eerie feeling that by the time I’m 33, reality will not exist in the same plane as it did before.

Such lightening and thunder will come there has never been seen before, bringing death and destruction.

Like the idea that every night might be the night before the world ends.

In the immediate postwar era, financial crises in advanced countries were rare events, and before 1970 did not happen at all.

You will follow every mountain, sea and shore, You will see from far and near a world you’ve never seen before.

Why it banged, or what happened before it banged.

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly,