The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ? proof that humans can work magic.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Nature I have constantly argued in my work is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate randomly recarving geography over 10 000-year epochs.

Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity and here has its greatest effect on life an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth that without them no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.