"An element of wisdom is knowing that life experiences are blood brothers with climate change, whether you have the resources to detect weather changes, it can still surprise you anytime."

"Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term."

"If the heights of our joy are measured by the depths of our gratitude, and gratitude is but a way of seeing, a spiritual perspective of smallness might offer a vital way of seeing especially conducive to gratitude."

"You can't just constantly judge a situation or a person because of what you're used to or how they look. They might turn out to be this sweet man who asks you what your dreams are. You know?"

"Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost in the footsteps of other lives."

"You aren't supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That's a very dangerous idea, and therefore it's been wiped out of history."

"A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... How utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was."