As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

Intuition is the highest form of intelligence, transcending all individual abilities and skills

Peace is not the absence of warbut the presence of love and care

When an individual fear or apathy would cause us to pass by the unfortunate, then life is of no account.

I can tell you for me it goes on forever. There are some things you can't ever find out. You can't find out in one life either.

I'm not really a fan of organized religion.

Khem was an ancient name for the land of Egypt; and both the words alchemy and chemistry are a perpetual reminder of the priority of Egypt's scientific knowledge.

That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.

When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

Love's reason's without reason