Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.

If a poor family falls on hard times in the woods, and no one is around to care, did it really happen?

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.