Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.
— Chinese proverb
… the reality that the All Blacks come in two forms: the Brazil of the oval ball game, and the panicky, exasperated fumblers of many a World Cup anticlimax. Given licence to play, New Zealand will smash your dreams. Assailed from the first whistle, they will scramble for their patterns and resent the interventions of lesser beings. This is a fault line in All Black rugby…
— Paul Hayward, the Guardian
Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
— Carl Sagan
My future starts when I wake up every morning. … Every day I find something creative to do with my life.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
— Voltaire
