Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:The worth of all men by their end esteem,And then praise, or due reproach them yield.

Humankind spends so much time admiring and ritualizing the inventions of humankind! And yet humankind is such a tiny part of all there is. -- Nigel S. Hey, Wonderment(Matador, 2012)

Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out...

Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

It's a funny things about human nature. Nobody ever wonders why they've got a healthy brother or a perfect kiddie. Anything goes wrong, though, we soon start why, oh why...

What is perfect, anyway? The absence of perfection and the existence of human nature in place of something we want to do or we don’t want to do, is an excuse, not an exoneration.

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.

The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken.

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Mr. Cat and Mr. Dog were neighbors who fought like, well, cats and dogs. That is until Mr. Rat moved in. It's fascinating how easily two enemies ally at the introduction of a third.

You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don't fall for their promises.

There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.

Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.