The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

Any experience can be transformed into something of value.

As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.