That something so obvious as the vanity of the world…

There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.

— Michel de Montaigne

I sometimes, in my sprightly moments, consider myself, in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In…

— John Adams

Psychiatry's a young science. Yesterday's madman may be tomorrow's genius. Beethoven and Van Gogh were both a bit loopy. In my view, most madmen…

— Clare Boylan

In science, each new result, sometimes quite surprising, heralds a step forward and allows one to discard some hypotheses, even though one or two…

— Stanley B. Prusiner

Gerry Fialka's annual PXL THIS is a reliably surprising and seductive round-up of recent work achieved with the PXL 2000 camera. This humble outdated…

— Michael Almereyda

It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have…

— Paul Zane Pilzer

We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time,…

— John Taylor Gatto

It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Sometimes people rise above their past, sometimes not. And sometimes the people you least expect it from—like Raylan and my father— have a way…

— Kayla Cunningham

Actually,” I said, hesitant to bring it up, “I was thinking along the lines of a curse that can turn you human.” “Or witch?”…

— Kim Harrison

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

— Christopher Hitchens

But we must not underestimate the potency of the mathematical process of abstraction. A surprising variety of things happen to have both magnitude and…

— Banesh Hoffmann

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating…

— Karen Thompson Walker

Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself

— William Deresiewicz

It is indeed a surprising and fortunate fact that nature can be expressed by relatively low-order mathematical functions.

— Rudolf Carnap