Albert Einstein - The World As I See It

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"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
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James Jones

“A man loves a thing. That don't mean it's gotta love him back.”

James Lee Burke - Swan Peak

"How do you explain to yourself the casual manner
in which you threw your life away?"

 

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Loren Eiseley - The Immense Journey

"For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness."

Huang Po

Your true nature is not lost in moments of delusion, nor is it gained at the moment of enlightenment.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Wind, Sand and Stars

"No doubt somewhere there did sit young girls among their white lemurs or their books, secretly compounding souls as rich in delights as secret gardens."