insightful

She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.

Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned, and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.

...the more of a fool a man is, the less he cares to look like one

As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.

If you believe something will make the world better, then it's always worth a try, even if you fail.

I am not interested in what is pleasant. I'm interested in what's useful.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

The quest for power is strange in that, once the quest has begun, the destination always seems to shift ever further away. What power one has is never enough; whatever happiness one had turns to bitterness.

To broaden one's prospective is to push back the swirling winds of ignorance.

Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners ...

The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action,

Silence is a chameleon that is colored by its surrounding circumstances

You're not seeing what you're looking at.

We must endure, Alyosha." That was the only thing she could say in response to my accounts of the ugliness and dreariness of life, of the suffering of the people _ of everything against which I protested so vehemently. I was not made for endurance, and if occasionally I exhibited this virtue of cattle, wood, and stone, I did so only to test myself, to try my strength and my stability. Sometimes young people, in the foolishness of immaturity, or in envy of the strength of their elders, strive, even successfully, to lift weights that overtax their bones and muscles; in their vanity they attempt to cross themselves with two-pood weights, like mature athletes. I too did this, in the literal and figurative sense, physically and spiritually, and only good fortune kept me from injuring myself fatally or crippling myself for life.For nothing cripples a person so dreadfully as endurance, as a humble submission to the forces of circumstance.

The constant talking didn't bother her, for cats use their voices to say 'here I am, where are you?' and this seemed to be the primary intention of most human conversation.

The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.

Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.

The difference between a good golf shot and a bad one is the same as the difference between a beautiful and a plain woman --a matter of millimetres.