“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”

People's Education interview (2007)
Context: Pay attention to your students. Hear what they say, try to find out what their capacities are, what make sense to them. Adapt what you are doing and saying to those capacities, but make your students stretch upward. I think the trick is to adapt to the level of a student, but never rest on that level — always make them reach out. … If a student does not quite get it the first time, he or she will come back and get it later. If you don’t set your writing — and teaching — at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

Source: The self-criticism of science

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

In an interview with Religion & Ethics Newsweekly http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/02/18/february-18-2011-ernest-gaines/8169/, February 18, 2011

Black God's Kiss (1934); p. 23
Short fiction, Jirel of Joiry (1969)

Book II, ch. 18, Reported in Bartlett's Quotations (1919) as "Be not hurried away by excitement, but say, "Semblance, wait for me a little".
Discourses

Source: The Beatles Anthology

"This Is The Sea"
This Is the Sea (1985)
Context: You're trying to make sense
of something that you just don't see
You're trying to make sense now
and you know you once held the key
But that was the river
this is the sea.

Variant: Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. If you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.