Our desires attract supporting reasons as a magnet the iron fillings.

Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.

To understand any living thing, you must, so to say, creep within and feel the beating of its heart.

The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.

Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world.

Men ardently pursue truth, assuming it will be angels' bread when found.

If there be a skeptical star I was born under it. Yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment.

There is more than a morsel of truth in the saying, "He who hates vice hates mankind."

Our business is not to solve problems beyond our mortal powers, but to see to it that our thoughts are not unworthy of the great theme.

Together, they at once dodged those parts of themselves and magnified them, making for enigmatic harmony and anarchy.

Leaf felt buried beneath the remains of their prior life, the ashes coating every part of who he thought he was in this community.

There is always someone worse off than yourself.

If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people's expectations, then you can go mad.

Every day you either get better or you get worse. You never stay the same.

The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.

Courage doesn't always roar.

My strength is breaking people down. I may not outrun or outsize you, but I will make you miss.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.