"A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders."
- Lord Dunsany, The Laughter of the Gods

"More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
- Woody Allen

"The advances we make in technology and the sciences are very important to our development as a race. But, like religion, science depends on what one brings to it. Were we only seeking cures for cancer and world hunger and the like, I would have no complaints. But what I condemn is this narrow-minded quest for the most devastating weapon or years of research that go into a better deoderant or shampoo. It's madness. It has no heart - no care for the spirit, be it ours or that of the earth itself."
- Charles de Lint, The Little Country

"You are totally unique, just like everyone else."
- Margaret Mead

"The history of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.
For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'"
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"No human thing is of serious importance."
- Plato

"I have often thought of humanity as a great experiment -- and, as you know, most experiments are not successful."
- Roger Stern, Superman: For Earth

"Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you."
- Richard Bach, "The Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" from Illusions

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got."
- Janis Joplin

"A people without history is like the wind on the buffalo grass."
- Sioux saying

"Avoid poetry, dramatic presentations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence."
- Sydney Smith

"The best way to avoid responsibility is to say 'I've got responsibilities.'"
- Richard Bach, "The Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" from Illusions

"Ladies and gentlemen! You've read about it in the newspapers! Now, shudder as you observe, BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES, that most rare and tragic of nature's mistakes! I give you ... the average man!
Physically unremarkable, it has instead a deformed set of values. Notice the hideously bloated sense of humanity's importance. The club-footed social conscience and the withered optimism.
It's certainly not for the squeamish, is it?
Most repulsive of all are its frail and useless notions of order and sanity. If too much weight is placed upon them, they snap.
How does it live, I hear you ask? How does this poor, pathetic specimen survive in today's harsh and irrational world? The sad answer is 'not very well.'
Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, random and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo! Who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this, any other response would be crazy!"
- Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke

"All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"
- John Lennon/Paul McCartney, "Eleanor Rigby"

"The only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstitions and pointless rituals."
- Latka Gravas (Andy Kauffman), Taxi

"Peculiar things, people. ... Dead certain they know what they need. Dead wrong, more often than not."
- John Ney Rieber, The Books of Magic: Summonings

"Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday."
- Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune

"There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death."
- Fran Liebowitz

"I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific."
- Lily Tomlin

"We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later. ... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth."
- Mary Antin

"How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

"I felt we were knitted together, the way the eye knits a landscape,
horizon to sky. I knew we would always be friends."
- Charles de Lint, Memory & Dream

"Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years."
- Richard Bach, "The Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" from Illusions

"I'm your only friend, I'm not your only friend,
but I'm a little glowing friend,
but really I'm not actually your friend, but I am...."
- They Might Be Giants

"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends."
- William Shakespeare, Richard II

"When having a smackeral of something with a friend, don't eat so much
that you get stuck in the doorway trying to get out."
- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne

"A friend is a gift you give yourself."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Instead of watching the telly and cowering behind locked doors, we'd be better off among people who know one another and enjoy singsongs in pubs. I am always persuaded by this argument."
- Roger Ebert

"Don't be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends."
- Richard Bach, "The Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" from Illusions

"Our affection for others is the one thing that is an infinite resource. We can never care too much, or for too many."
- Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk

"He hasn't an enemy in the world -- but all his friends hate him."
- Eddie Cantor

"Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be a bunch of bastards."
- R.A. Dickson

"I should like to think of you as someone I knew many years ago and, alas, wouldn't see again. That would be charming."
- Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."
- Richard Bach, "The Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" from Illusions<

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."
- Plato

"A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Friendship without self-interest is one of the rare and beautiful things of life."
- James F. Byrnes

"When I was a kid, I had two friends, and they were imaginary and they would only play with each other."
- Rita Rudner

"If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people."
- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

"Friendship is constant in all things save in the office and affairs of love."
- William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the ocean searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure."
- from California Monthly

"You teach best what you most need to learn."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"Belief gets in the way of learning."
- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

"A terribly difficult lesson to learn is that some questions don't have answers."
- Katherine Graham

"Wondering's healthy. Broadens the mind.
Opens you up to all sorts of stray thoughts and possibilities."
- Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying

"Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
- G.M. Trevelyan

"Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."
- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

"You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself."
- Chinese Proverb

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
- Pablo Picasso

"The purpose of an education is not to earn a better living;
it is to learn to live a better life."
- C.R. Leach

"The whole process of education is to find out what you're good at and what you enjoy doing. If you can get paid for that, it's a bonus."
- John Allan Cameron "The trick is not to simply acquire the knowledge, but to survive the lessons."
- Charles de Lint, Svaha

"Isn't it strange how much we know if we only ask ourselves instead of somebody else?"
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater."
- Gail Godwin

"Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra.
In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra."
- Fran Lebowitz

"I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that, I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition."
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

"Science plays a vital role in your life; but when it comes to scientific knowledge, there's an excellent chance that you're a moron. ... This is, after all, a nation that has produced tournament bass fishing and the Home Shopping Channel; we should be shocked that the average American still knows how to walk erect."
- Dave Barry, columnist

"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"It doesn't really matter if the experience comes from outside or inside. Where it comes from isn't important at all. What's important is that it does come -- and that we're receptive enough to recognize and accept it."
- Charles de Lint, "In the Quiet After Midnight," Moonlight & Vines

"The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education."
- John Updike

"Life, without an attempt to understand it, is hardly worth living."
- Socrates

"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
- Wilson Mizner

"I didn't really start taking education seriously until I stopped having it done to me and started doing it myself."
- Joe Klein, political correspondent

"Where everyone thinks alike, no one thinks at all."
- Albert Einstein

"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, "Last Chance to See"

"Humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn -- when they do, which isn't often -- on their own, the hard way."
- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

"Ad hoc, Ad loc, quid pro quo,
So little time, so much to know."
- Jeremy Hilary Boob, Ph.D., Yellow Submarine

"Civilization is what we carry on over lunch and dinner and, in America, where a family can go for weeks and never sit down in one place at one time and say 25 words or more, you sometimes wonder if conversation or stories will exist 20 years from now or if we'll just network by e-mail."
- Garrison Keillor

"The human race has unfortunately been plagued with this burden since history began. We've had tribal purity, religious purity, political purity, national purity, sexual purity, racial purity and so on. And what is pure? Well, usually the idea works like this: if you have the same skin color, the same religion, the same politics, the same sexual orientation, the same gender and root for the same football team as I do, then you must be pure. If not, then you are not pure and it's OK for me to do bad things to you."
- Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell

"We've gotten to the point where everybody's got a right and nobody's got a responsibility."
- Newton Minow

"The Bible quotes the Lord as telling us to 'be fruitful and multiply' -- but I can't believe he didn't intend for us to use some common sense about it. ... The next line of that is 'and replenish the Earth' -- seems to me, most folks have forgotten that part."
- Roger Stern, Superman: For Earth

"A man can create a wonderful work of art, compose an epic or write a fantastic novel, build a marvelous bridge or design a new rocket engine and be proclaimed a genius. But if he goes and takes a nap on the highway and is run over by a truck, he would be called a fool.
Ah, the many-sided splendour of the world which allows such diversity, that a man may be BOTH genius and fool!
So you can look at the great cities of the world, the monuments to culture and learning, and say 'YES, humans are pretty smart critters!' But then when you look at the poisons in our air and our water, the toxic waste irradiating our environment, the bloody wars which have murdered millions, the unsolved problems of poverty and hunger ... well, these examples lead us to believe that the human race is napping on the highway."
- Tom Knapp

"A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular."
- Adlai Stevenson

"The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers."
- Mohandas Gandhi

"Everyone is criticizing and belittling the times. Yet I think that our times,
like all times, are very good times if only we know what to do with them."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present."
- Loren Eiseley, "The Chresmologue"

"Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind."
- Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebonde"

"Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us."
- Loren Eiseley, "The Mind as Nature"

"There was no difference at all between the richest man and the poorest beggar, apart from the fact that the former had lots of money, food, power, fine clothes, and good health. But at least he wasn't any better. Just richer, fatter, more powerful, better dressed and healthier."
- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

"There is a difference between getting money for what you do, and doing it for money.
If you don't do it for love, or because you think it needs doing, get out and let somebody else do it.
If nobody else does it, maybe that means it shouldn't be done."
- Emma Bull, Bone Dance

"The whole point of having a pile of gold was, well, to have a pile of gold. It didn't have to do anything other than be just as oraceous as gold can be."
- Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
- H.G. Wells