"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."
— Haruki Murakami (Hear the Wind Sing)

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
— Cormac McCarthy

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
— Douglas Adams

"We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on."
— Richard P. Feynman

"Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds."
— Carl Sagan

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!"
— Larry Niven

"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."
— Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

"The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively."
— Niels Bohr

"Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

-this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else."
— Richard Dawkins

"Buddhism holds that everything is in constant flux. Thus the question is whether we are to accept change passively and be swept away by it or whether we are to take the lead and create positive changes on our own initiative. While conservatism and self-protection might be likened to winter, night, and death, the spirit of pioneering and attempting to realize ideals evokes images of spring, morning, and birth."
— Daisaku Ikeda

"You only lose what you cling to."
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t squeak."
— Tom Robbins (Skinny Legs and All)

"It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die"
— Saul Williams

"I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell."
— Octavia E. Butler

"A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it."
— Zora Neale Hurston

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
— Marie Curie

"A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to."
— Tom Bissell

"One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad."
— Aleister Crowley (Magick: Liber ABA)

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
— Niels Bohr

"'What's a philosopher?' said Brutha.
'Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head."
— Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
— Marshall McLuhan

"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Life is a long lesson in humility."
— James M. Barrie

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
— Malcolm X

"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more."
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it."
— Sean Carroll

"I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move"
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (Tennyson's Poetry)

"Life is a zoo in a jungle"
— Peter De Vries

"To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble."
— Bill Watterson

"/It's/ much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine."
— Woody Allen

"Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."
— Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Fall seven times, stand up eight."
— Japanese Proverb