Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

No worthy goal should come easily, he told himself. Suffering created value.

I crave my mom's Sloppy Joes.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say 'LOL.' Just what? But it means 'laugh.' Why don't you just laugh? What are you doing?

My goal was just to try and be the best player on my high school team, and look where I am now. And that was still my goal as a young kid, just to try and be a little better than my brother was.

Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I'm not, she said.

Sometimes you want to hear your own mother's voice.

How many diamonds can you retrieve from one single mine; there has to be an end somewhere. I don't see any natural fast bowler after me.

These passions of soul, these conflicts so fierce, will cease, and be repressed by the casting of a little dust.

Every morning, in your first view of the day, you have the choice to say, 'Good morning, God' or 'Good God, morning.'