Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.

We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

When you say ‘Black is beautiful’ you are saying, ‘Man you are okay as you are, begin to look upon yourself as a human being.

Numerous are the wares that nature produces by the dozen, but her choice products are few.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want — an adorable pancreas?

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you're glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

I'm going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.