What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
-Albert Pike

Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.
- Theodore Zeldin