You have to have a temperamental attraction to dangerous ideas.

It has been said that the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child.

When you are trying to understand the world, it is unwise to assume that you occupy a privileged position in it.

Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.

To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world

I needed someone to tell me that I was sane, that I was special, and that I wasn't all that special.

It wasn't that she lit up, but that everything else seemed to dim. Things he thought were important or bright turned out not to be when she was around, when they were held up against her glow.

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.

I find that it is much easier now for women to be in any position because, as you see, they are presidents of banks, they are prime ministers, they are doctors. Everything is about women.

How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

There can be no prosperity without law and order.

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, how much beer is there in the German intelligence.

The ornaments of our homes are the friends that visit it

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

Well, uh, all people - all, I think all human begins, uh, have good attributes, and they also have their flaws.