“I think the revolutionary role of a writer is to make language that makes coalition possible, language that makes us see things in a new way.” 

“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.” 

“Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.” 

“Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.” 

“In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious—whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning.”

“In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.” 

“That's why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.” 

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”

“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

“To know your future you must know your past”

“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”

“The bible is literature, not dogma.”

“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”

“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

“A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”

“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten”

“Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.” 

“I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.” 

“It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.” 

“As Dr. King once said, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” 

“I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.” 

“You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.” 

“we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.” 

“My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.” 

“In truth, we don't know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.” 

“The worship of power is an old religion.”

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”

“why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.”

“I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”

“Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”

“The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.”

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.”

“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”

“The earth has its music for those who will listen.”

“When someone asks me if I believe in God and I say no—I believe in people—I” 

“Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.” 

“I’m not sure we can understand another country if we don’t understand our own.” 

“The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.”