We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.

It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.

If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.

The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.

Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.

We cannot pluck a flower witout disturbing a star.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

Bigness comes from doing many small things well. ... Individually they are not very dramatic transactions. Together though they add up.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

The shape of the heaven is of necessity spherical; for that is the shape most appropriate to its substance and also by nature primary.

The lucky person passes for a genius.

I think I had a tendency to get stuck inside my head and go to some very dark places in my mind, and get stuck there. I couldn't see a way to get out.

The impact of racism has changed our look at ourselves because basically racism was meant to make us look unfaithfully at ourselves, and to not treasure our institutions.

[John Kerry] actually stole my line because when I became Secretary of State, I said, 'I hope my heels will fill Warren Christopher's shoes.' So he reversed that.

The waves belong to the water. Does the water belong to the waves?

Decide what you want to be, do, and have, think the thoughts of it, emit the frequency, and your vision will become your life.