My face has not ignored the passage of time, but recorded it with scars, lines, furrows, and erosions.

A sad soul can kill you much quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.

...but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.

He put my sins in a new perspective. Where as they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and dignity. I hadn't been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

[Steinbeck without a rabies certificate for Charley, his immunized dog] And it is usually so with governments- not a fact but a small slip of paper.

[at the US-Canadian boarder]
"You should not write anything in your passport. That's the regulation"
"I won't ever do it again. I promise." And I wanted to promise him I wouldn't lie or steal or associate with person's of loose morals, or covet my neighbor's wife, or anything.

John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley In search of America

If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an "artless art" growing out of the Unconscious.

D. T. Suzuki in Zen in the Art of Archery

Botchan

And when such a person finds you worthy of respect, you should consider it something more precious than a fortune in gold.

If all conferences were such a farce, you'd be better off giving them a miss and taking a nap instead.

Really, there's nothing in the world as undependable as human beings.

Well, if you put it in such explicit terms it loses all meaning‽

Natsume Soseki in Botchan