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We shall have to work out our future happiness by suffering: pay for it somehow by fresh miseries. Everything is purified by suffering.... Oh, Vanya, how much pain there is in the world!

As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky—if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it.

Remember, in the next ten years, our confusion will reach new heights of sophistication. (Or, as Mark Twain put it, "Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations we shall soon know nothing at all about it.")

The idea that California is in large part a collection and compaction of oceanic islands was a reverberation of an ancient myth as well as a development in a science. For at least two thousand years, people described certain undiscovered islands with a force of imagination that became belief.... The Fortunate Isles, for example, and the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the Lost Atlantis.

The idea that California is in large part a collection and compaction of oceanic islands was a reverberation of an ancient myth as well as a development in a science. For at least two thousand years, people described certain undiscovered islands with a force of imagination that became belief.... The Fortunate Isles, for example, and the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the Lost Atlantis.

In 1838, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Dick ... first proposed the movements on the earth's surface that eventually became known as continental drift and plate tectonics.

I refuse to be. In
the madhouse of the inhuman
I refuse to live.
With the wolves of the market place

I refuse to howl
Among the sharks of the plain
I refuse to swim down
where moving backs make a current.

Socrates: In my opinion, it takes true goodness to make a man or woman happy, and an immoral, wicked person is unhappy.

The goal of a political party is something vague and unreal. If it were real, it would demand a great effort of attention, for the mind does not easily encompass the concept of the public interest. Conversely, the existence of the party is something concrete and obvious; it is perceived without any effort. Therefore, unavoidably, the party becomes in fact its own end.

We understand nothing. Nothing! Incredible, that a reasoning man should be in a situation in which he comprehends nothing whatsoever!

Complaint, which is the condition of Persius, lies not in the province of poetry. Erelong the enjoyment of a superior good would have changed his disgust into regret. We can never have much sympathy with the complainer; for after searching nature through, we conclude that he must be both plaintiff and defendant too, and so had best come to a settlement without a hearing.

I am astonished at the singular pertinacity and endurance of our lives. The miracle is, that what is is, when it is so difficult, if not impossible, for anything else to be; that we walk on in our particular paths so far, before we fall on death and fate, merely because we must walk in some path; that every man can get a living, and so few can do anything more.

Reading the classics, or conversing with those old Greeks and Latins in their surviving works, is like walking amid the stars and constellations, a high and by way serene to travel. Indeed, the true scholar will be not a little of an astronomer in his habits. Distracting cares will not be allowed to obstruct the field of his vision, for the higher regions of literature, like astronomy, are above storm and darkness.

The universe is so aptly fitted to our organization that the eye wanders and reposes at the same time. On every side there is something to soothe and refresh this sense. Look up at the tree-tops and see how finely Nature finishes off her work there. See how the pines spire without end higher and higher, and make a peaceful fringe to the earth.

If we could listen but for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization. Nations are not whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations; but the Indian does well to continue Indian.

Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travellers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.

Long-distance travel will stress a lobster and affect it physically. Among other things, it loses weight and accumulates ammonia. This can happen on a smooth highway, let alone in giddy turbulence at 30,000 feet. If a lobster succumbs, the ammonia will detonate as a shaped olfactory charge. The next time your quarterback is sacked unconscious, put a dead lobster under his nose and he'll stand up ready for action.

Atlanta has a lot of wrecks due to aggressive drivers who lack skill. In Los Angeles, there's a comparable percentage of aggressive drivers, but they have skill. The worst drivers anywhere are in New Jersey. Their life cannot mean a great deal to them. They take a lot of chances I wouldn't take -- just to get to work on time.

It seemed as if all the world, with its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their habitations, the refuges of the poor, or the gilded palaces for the comfort of the powerful of this world, was at that twilight hour like a fantastic vision of fairyland, like a dream which in its turn would vanish and pass away like vapor in the dark blue sky.

Night after night he and his fellow officers patrolled the city in the lumbering police van, witnessing human dramas that were hidden from others. Some the night provoked and seduced; others it wounded and terrified.

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed oo long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There's a boy who really made something out of nothing.

He broke his toys to see how they were made, he whittled the arm of a chair with one of papa's old razors, he knocked down a tanagra figure in the living room to see if it were hollow and if there were anything inside; when he walked he struck the heads from plants and flowers with his cane; each time he was deeply disappointed, things were stupid, nothing really and truly existed.

Normal people think I belong with them. But I couldn't stay an hour among them. I need to live out there, on the other side of the wall. But they don't want me out there.

All is mine but nothing owned,
nothing owned for memory
and mine only when I look.

[Billy the Kid] never seemed to care for money, except to buy cartridges with; then he would much prefer to gamble for them straight. Cartridges were scarce, and he always used about ten times as much as anyone else. He would practice shooting at everything he saw and from every conceivable angle, on and off his horse.

[Reagan] had not been looking good recently; he seemed to be about 110 years old and utterly disoriented at all times.... His eyes had a viscous jellylike appearance and he had taken to letting his hands flap crazily at his sides when he walked down the halls of the White House, even when photographers were present.

There is no need for the president of the United States to be smart.
He can be hovering on the grim cusp of brain death and still be the most powerful man in the world. He can arrest the chief of the mafia and sell the Washington Monument to Arabs and nobody will question his judgment.

The llano could be the most beautiful place in the world—but it can also be the cruelest. It changes, like a woman changes. The rich rancheros sucked the earth dry with their deep wells, and so the heavy snows had to come to replenish the water in the earth. The greedy men overgrazed their ranches, and so now the wind picks up the barren soil and throws it in their faces.

I began to understand why the blood of spring is called the bad blood. It was bad not because it brought growth, that was good, but because it raised from dark interiors the restless, wild urges that lay sleeping all winter. It revealed hidden desires to the light of the new warm sun.