“Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.”

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

“A philosopher once said, "It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results." Well, they don't!”

“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.”

“Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.”

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. ”