Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

“Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.” 

“Why?' is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you 'What's the time?' or 'When was the battle of 1066?' or 'How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?' The answers are easy and are, respectively, 'Seven-thirty in the evening,' 'Ten-fifteen in the morning,' and 'Don't ask stupid questions.” 

“People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.” 

“Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.” 

“Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.” 

“There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.” 

“To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.” 

“We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.” 

“None of us are ever who we were yesterday.” 

“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.” 

“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” 

“The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.” 

“Damn the Absolute!” 

“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.” 

“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.” 

“Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.” 

“[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.” 

“A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.” 

“We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.” 

No matter what one does, regardless of failure or success, the experience is a form of success in itself.