"They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence … to productivity. And they’re happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other."

"Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money."

"The god of many cannot remain the true god."

"Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for."

"I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet."

"The drives were nature’s first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world’s obstacles to them."

"To think yourself incapable of crime is one failure of the imagination. To think yourself capable of all crimes is another."

"To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that’s on their minds, even before it’s on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a walkman so what’s going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn’t much like being talked at; he can’t conceal how easily he gets bored."

"Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into."

"A day is only a day. But a life is only a life."

"First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need."

"Think of all the smart people made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn’t fine long when used as a hammer."

"Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity."

"The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it."

"A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do."

"Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you."

"So many times I’ve made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted."

"Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method."

"The single sin is less of a problem than the good reasons for it."

"The tyrant puts down his own rebellion, everywhere."

"The great consolation of righteousness is never having to worry whether you’re a bore."

"God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself."

"Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one."

"On what is valuable thieves and the law agree."

"What I’m not changes more than what I am."

"Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without."

"The viruses that co-opt the machinery of our cells; the stories we allow to enter and explain us."

"Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?"

"If you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does."

"The road reaches every place, the short cut only one."

"The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety."

"Suppose you had to remember to beat your heart, contract in exact sequence the muscles you use for every step. … Conservatism comes out of the body, the sense of many things being done for us that any attempt to re-think, or even make conscious, would fatally disrupt."

"Easier to keep changing your life than to live it."

"Often you only have to ask What would I do if I were not afraid?"

"It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules."

"Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer."

"Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden."

"There are crimes I don’t commit mainly because I don’t want to find out I could."

"It is only logical for the translator to become a part of the world of the author."

"The translator constantly learns new things about himself."

"However, there is one great temptation and that is that you can forget that the aim of the writer was to reject all other worlds and to construct one of his own and that the aim of the translator is to re-embody himself into the world of the various writers."

"The greatest pleasure in translating is precisely this feeling of spiritual closeness and spiritual merging with the translated author. Moreover this spiritual relation is different with every writer."

"It is the expensiveness of our pleasures that makes the world poor and keeps us poor in ourselves. If we could but learn to find enjoyment in the things of the mind, the economic problems would solve themselves."

"The value of a mind is measured by the nature of the objects it habitually contemplates. They whose thoughts are of trifles are trifling: they who dwell with what is eternally true, good and fair, are like unto God."

"A Wise man knows that much of what he says and does is commonplace and trivial. His thoughts are not all solemn and sacred in his own eyes. He is able to laugh at himself and is not offended when others make him a subject whereon to exercise their wit."