"The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."
— Richard P. Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
— Richard P. Feynman

"Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is."
— Richard P. Feynman

"Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all."
— Richard P. Feynman

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you. "
— Philip Roth

"The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. "
— Philip Roth (The Dying Animal)

"He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense."
— Philip Roth (American Pastoral)

"Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game."
— Philip Roth (The Human Stain)

"Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you."
— Philip Roth

"Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them."
— Philip Roth

"You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more."
— Philip Roth (The Dying Animal)

"Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not."
— Philip Roth

""And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.'""
— Philip Roth

"How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard."
— Philip Roth (The Professor of Desire)

"I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give. (349)"
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe. "
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)