I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?

I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.

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

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

I prefer to praise people and the world rather than criticize them and it.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I used to meditate all the time in bed. That was when I was raising my daughter, and I'd get her up and off to school, and then I would go back to bed and meditate. And then I would do the same in the evening, and that was very good for that period because I had so many things to juggle as a single mother.

"Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength."

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.

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

Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.

One must take what nature gives as one finds it.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.

How wretchedly inadequate is the theoretical physicist as he stands before Nature, and before his students.

In the end, we’ll all become stories.

My scientific work is motivated by an irresistible longing to understand the secrets of nature and by no other feelings. My love for justice and the striving to contribute towards the improvement of human conditions are quite independent from my scientific interests.

A beautiful soul has no other merit than its own existence.

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

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.

(On if his life was a success): Neither on my deathbed nor before will I ask myself such a question. Nature is not an engineer or a contractor, and I myself am a part of Nature.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!

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

Space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

A spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.

If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.

I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child.

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.

What I see is a certain something, desolate and grey as infinity. I do not believe that the structure of the human brain is to be blamed for the fact that man cannot grasp infinity.

Make a lot of walks to get healthy and don’t read that much but save yourself some until you’re grown up.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Beauty unites all things, links together flower and star, with chains more certain than those of reason. The poet, the artist, thus finds the clue which guides them in their pilgrimage throughout the world.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

Girls aren’t beautiful, they’re pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know, they have lost something and picked up something else.

Creativity is intelligence having fun.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

I lived in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in maturity.

At any rate, I am convinced that He does not play dice.

I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.

How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!