No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness.

We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

We're all so afraid of what everyone around us thinks that we risk ourselves to desperation. It's utterly stupid. It's utterly frightening. But it's utterly human.

No sustainable prosperity or security can be attained at the expense or marginalization of others. Indeed, in today’s world, humanity will either triumph or fail as a whole.

No one has, or ever will, be able to experience or express your singular point of view, which is why it is so important, both for you and all humanity, that you follow your heart.

It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can't explain, bad and terrible things.

People create sins out of nothing and in doing so have enslaved their fellow man! Man is not bound by sin but man is bound by the idea that almost everything he is doing is a sin!

Turn back to humanity – to the world – to love! Become gardeners – whatever you want! – become nothing! – and the whole of space will be free for you.

The vastness of possibilities in space reminded me that while my life felt important, it was tiny in the scheme of things. Human civilization was only a blink on the radar of time.

I have been cheated out of being treated like a human being. In my reflection I saw an empty vessel. They had cheated me and I was desperate to make the sharp pain in my head stop.

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

E se a minha vida não fôr mais do que um processo de materialização, através do qual eu dou forma a imagens latentes que vivem adormecidas em mim?

Ah, but is it not the mind that is the real grace of Homo sapiens? All the things to think about! All the things to read and appreciate! All the arts! All the things of the spirit!

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.