“ Words can never say, as music can, the unsayable grace that leaps like light from mind to mind.

“ …And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light…

“ Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it.

“ We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile, and nothing can grow there. Too much, the best of us is washed away. My rains have come and gone…for now. Yours are just beginning.

“ To the dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage.

“ This minute, too, is part of eternity.

“ We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything—solitude, hardship, exhaustion, death. We’re proud of ourselves. But when you think about it, our enthusiasm’s a sham. We don’t want other worlds; we want mirrors.

“ Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

“ In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

“ Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.