“God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.”

We’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

Memory at last has what I sought.

I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

I’m drowning in papers.

It isn’t the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Believe in the power of your own voice. The more noise you make, the more accountability you demand from your leaders, the more our world will change for the better.

I’ve always taken ‘The Wizard of Oz’ very seriously, you know. I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I’ve spent my entire life trying to get over it.

I struggle for what I believe in. Life is short, it’s impossible to repeat something; you have to take advantage of things when you can reach them.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

We believe in individual initiative, personal responsibility, opportunity, freedom, small government, the Constitution. These principles, these American principles are key to getting our economy back to being successful and leading the world.

Bill [Gates] and I believe philanthropy can only be effective if it starts things and proves whether they actually work or not. That’s the place that governments often don’t want to, or can’t, work.

I firmly believe you’re never supposed to wish for more than you’re willing to work for. Expectations should never exceed your effort.