Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

William Saroyan

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity?

William Saroyan

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

William Saroyan

I’m against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.

David Attenborough

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Khalil Gibran

Yesterday is but today’s memory, tomorrow is today’s dream.

Khalil Gibran

Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one’s living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

Robert Oppenheimer (Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections)