“To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.”

“You will be free of the world's turbulence as soon as you stop taking your thoughts so seriously.”

“A man's allowed to make lots of small mistakes, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if the mistakes are big ones and they weigh him down, his only solution is to stop taking himself seriously. It's the only way to avoid suffering - suffering, prolonged, can be fatal.”

“Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. …The most important thing accomplished by the three-degree radiation background in 1965 was to force us to take seriously the idea that there was an early universe.”

“A serious ape whom none take seriously,
Obliged in this fool's world to earn his nuts
By hard buffoonery.”

“The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.”

“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”

“God takes such great pleasure in the sanctity of His saints that in the interests of a few, He often allows the whole Church to suffer great loss.”

“So the story of the baby-sitting co-op is not a mere amusement. If people would only take it seriously—if they could only understand that when great economic issues are at stake, whimsical parables are not a waste of time but the key to enlightenment—it is a story that could save the world.”

“The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.”