“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.”

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

“Hed no longer be a grade-motivated person. Hed be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. Hed be a free man. He wouldnt need a lot...”

“In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...”

“What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are n...”

“There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, f...”

“Tears are words the heart can't express”

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”

“Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.”

“I sensed that if I were ever to meet [Senator Orrin] Hatch face-to-face there would be little that we could agree upon. There was something about watching Hatch that reminded me of unpleasant, futi...”

“Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”

“To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.”

“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...”