I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, "That's that, where do we go from here?"

~ William Saroyan ~

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot evenimagine. ~ Mary Shelley ~

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

~ Maurice Maeterlinck ~

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their real import or value.

~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ~

I'm not smart. I try to observe. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton was the one who asked why.

~ Bernard Baruch ~

I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I believe that in the attempt to fulfil the law of righteousness, howeverimperfect it must remain, are to be found the inspiration, the consolation, and the sanctification of human existence.

~ Felix Adler ~

We have to be reminded over and over again that Nature is full of paradoxes.

~ Henry Fairfield Osborn ~

I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earthhe lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire.

~ Wendell Berry ~

We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe...

~ Clifford D. Simak ~