The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.

Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.

[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

Power is a curious thing. Who lives, Who dies. Power resides where men believe it resides. It is a trick, A shadow on the wall.

Luck is not as random as you think.Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.

Age is relative. Experience is relative. And I think often intensity is confused with maturity.

I believe in instinct, not reason. When reason is right, nine times out of ten it is impotent, and when it prevails, nine times out of ten it is wrong.

The Superior Man is all-embracing and not partial. The inferior man is partial and not all-embracing.

The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

Satan's successes are the greatest when he appears with the name of God on his lips.

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

Thus through half-belief, we are often doomed to repeat that very past we should have learned from.

I was born with a serious spiritual consciousness and for many years studied different paths.