The machine conceals the machinations.

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

The great authors share their souls with us — literally.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.

A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.

Reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that: a playing of illusions on the shallow void.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation overcrowding reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact of being close to people, of being touched.

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.