Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

They teach you, as children, that you might go to heaven. They never teach you that heaven might come to you.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

And God 'sits in the heavens and laughs' at the proud who pretend to be more than they are.

Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did.

You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.

I'm clearly not a writer, but I'm always a fan of them.

Trading gives you an incredibly intense feeling of what life is all about.

Gratitude is a species of justice.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

There is no best way to make art, but there are a lot of better ways.