Part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
The North Pole will be ice-free during summer in years to come, and that itself will put the Arctic Sea basin on a very high risk of... environmental disasters that might be there.
Remember that history always repeats itself. Every great bubble in history has broken. There are no exceptions.
Graphics has lately made a great shift towards machine learning, which itself is about understanding data.
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
The great thing about a culture is that once you really get it going, it evolves on its own. It's self-organizing. It's dynamic. It just feeds on itself.
The U.S. has been a great friend all these years, but as soon as Africa found itself starting to move up, the U.S. is really disengaging.
I have ideas in mind, things that I'm working toward. There have to be goals; there has to be a challenge. Just playing, in and of itself, is great. But there has to be some motivation to it.
When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups.
A good story, a story resonant and remarkable, can be remade endlessly to tell new sides of itself for new generations of readers.
One only dies once, and if one does not die well, a good opportunity is lost and will not present itself again.
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
The key to making the inspections work is the Iraqi government making the crucial decision that because of the international pressure Iraq has to disarm itself.
Imperceptibly, the developed world's manufacturing base was gradually eroding and being replaced by securitized finance that destroyed itself and nearly its economies in 2008.
Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.
