No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.

"Prot, what's the first thing we have to do in order to survive the next century?"
"Everything."
"Everything?"
"It's all interrelated. For example, you can't reduce your numbers until you eliminate your religious beliefs. And you can't do that as long as there is an abundance of ignorance and a dearth of education. But you can't change that as long as people with the most money use it to maintain the status quo. And if you maintain the status quo, your environment will soon collapse. But you can't protect the environment from collapse until you reduce your numbers - shall I go on?"

Jeg gikk ikke i min fars fotspor
men jeg så dem
uten de sporene
kunne jeg aldri valgt en annen vei

The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die.

First to create difference - to establish strangeness - then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as almost no other.

Governments which use force are based upon bad principles of human engineering.

People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw.

He who leaps for the sky may fall, it's true. But he may also fly.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. In the present case, what is it that has really happened? Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine.

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.

And as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.