“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

“Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legisl...”

“After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.”

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

“I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.”

“Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”