“The ideal woman which is in every man’s mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand.”

People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.

If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

No battle is ever won … victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

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.