Wisdom

How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and,' 'the,' and 'I,' and 'it,' and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.

During war, the laws are silent.

Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.

She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass.

We also serve who only punctuate.

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

...The whole 'know thyself' thing isn’t a journey to a fixed destination. Learning about myself changes me, forcing me to learn more. 'Know thyself' isn’t a goal; it’s a road.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.

One of the interesting things about Twitter is looking how famous people choose to use it. Take someone like Steve Martin, who I follow: it's all sorts of comic gems, nothing private, nothing personal - all jokes. Other celebrities are overtly personal - like Charlie Sheen. I do a mix of observations and updates.

. . . Failure is also the stern parent of truth. (p525).

Always remember, animals can intimidate men with their strength but men cannot intimidate animals with their intelligence.

Never risk in the dark to search the light. Conversely, be light and shine in the darkness as a moon.

Simply that we are mirroring the trends in society, at any given time smuggling was an issue in the seventies, corruption is an issue today, and we faithfully reflect those issues.

We must patiently endure the times.

By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

If you feel that favors can be returned then you are wrong, no matter how ever big or small it is, it can never be returned. Favor is always for lifetime...

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.