"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." - Edward O. Wilson - Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge
Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind. ~Leo Rosten
You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French by Richard Howard
[T]hings are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing. ~Jean Paul Sartre, *Nausea
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
The Sign of Four.. Sherlock Holmes
"But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light."
William Collns quotes
"Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."