A few quotes I like:
 

From  Two Years Before the Mast  (1837):   This passenger--the first and only one we had had, except to go from port to port on the coast--was no one else than a gentleman whom  I had known in my smoother days, and the last person I should have  expected to see on the coast of California--Professor Nuttall of Cambridge. I had left him quietly seated in the chair of the Botany and Ornithology Department at Harvard University, and the next I saw of him, he was strolling about San Diego beach, in a sailors' pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells.       ...I was often amused to see the sailors puzzled to know what to make of him, and to hear their conjectures about him and his  business.  ...The Pilgrim's crew called Mr. Nuttall "Old Curious," from his zeal for curiosities; and some of them said that he was crazy, and that his friends let him go about and amuse himself this  way.  Why else would (he)... come to such a place as California to pick up  shells and stones, they could not understand.   One of them, however, who  had seen something more of the world ashore said:       "Oh, 'vast there!   ...I've seen them colleges and know the ropes. They keep all such things for cur'osities, and study 'em, and have men a purpose to go and get 'em.  ...He'll carry all these things to the college, and if they are better than any that they have had before, he'll be head of the college. Then, by and by, somebody else will go after some more, and if they beat him he'll have to go again, or else give up his berth.  That's the way they do it.  This old covery knows the  ropes. He has worked a traverse over 'em, and come 'way out  here where nobody's ever been afore, and where they'll never think  of coming."     This explanation satisfied Jack; and as it raised  Mr. Nuttall's credit, and was near enough to the truth for common purposes, I did not disturb it.                                               -- Richard Henry Dana

"Years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do
than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bow lines. Sail away from the safe harbor. 
Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore. Dream. Discover."
-- Mark Twain

"Oh, we would all like to sail through life with no thought of tomorrow.
But that cannot be.
We have our duties.
Our... obligations."
      --  Mrs. Chasen (played by Vivian Pickels), in the film Harold and Maude
 

I wish I knew, I wish I knew.
What makes me, me?
What makes you, you?
It's just another point of view,
a state of mind I'm going through.
So what I see is never true...  
-- Cat Stevens, I Wish, I Wish (song lyrics)
 

Success is getting what you want;
happiness is wanting what you get.
-- Unknown.
 

"Dear Friend,
Just a line to show that I am alive & kicking and going grand.
It's a treat.
Yours, WJR. "
 From a postcard -- the front
shows a color photo the Titanic, postmarked three days
before the ship sank, taking WJR with it. 
 

Live in the moment;
appreciate the past;
anticipate the future.
-- Me (although I am sure that I picked up the general idea somewhere...)
 

"...100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds...
(the progeny of) quantum mechanics writ large across the sky."
-- Brain Greene,  The Fabric of the Cosmos, (p. 308)
 

"I may be just an anorexic duck and insignificant in the grand scheme of things,
but I'm all I've got."
-- The Duck, from the film Babe
 

It is such a privilege to be born at all... such a very improbable event.
We have the privilege of being in this universe for a few decades. And during
that time it is an enormous privilege to be able to understand something
about the universe ... where we came from.
-- Richard Dawkins
 

 Conversation overheard between two students on a campus elevator
            (St. Robert Hall, LMU, April 26, 2005):

He: "Did you go to his office hours?"
She: "Yes. But the problem is that you go a professor's office hours
    and you see at their office that they have hobbies. But before that
    you thought that they were, like, um... really superior."
He: "Yeah."
She: (Sounding quite let down.) "And so the more you talk to them, the more you
    realize that they are, like, regular people.  And not really that superior."
He: "Huh.."
She:  "Then," (a pause), " ...you really feel like you don't want to study as hard anymore."
       

If you are an insomniac, some photos from my mis-spent youth and early career
will provide a likely cure (informed consent: hobbies).