My parents were divorced and I didn't grow up with my father, but I spent a lot of time around him, and his influence on me has been profound.
I have accepted all and I am free. The inner chains are broken, as well as those outside.
It is because everything must come to an end that everything is so beautiful.
Tenderness is total love, whereas justice is only a part of love, though it believes itself, mistakenly, to be the whole.
Man never has what he wants, because what he wants is everything.
With all the infinite possibilities of spiritual life before you, do not settle down on a little patch of dusty ground at the mountain's foot in restful content. Be not content until you reach the mountain's summit.
I was one of those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.
After the signing of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman on the street, "What have you given us, sir?" Franklin Responded, "A Republic, if you can keep it. " A critical moment in history has come; our Republic is in jeopardy. Can we keep it? If the answer to that question, as I fear, is "no," then we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Forty years as an astronomer have not quelled my enthusiasm for lying outside after dark, staring up at the stars. It isn't only the beauty of the night sky that thrills me. It's the sense I have that some of those points of light are the home stars of beings not so different from us, daily cares and all, who look across space with wonder, just as we do.