From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

It is so much easier to honour the leaders who are honourable.

You don’t always have to take it all on, either, you know. The weight of the world. The responsibility for everyone else’s problems. Sometimes it’s okay to let somebody else worry about you.

Christian hands never clasp and He doesn't give gifts for gain because a gift can never stop being a gift - it is always meant to be given.

If you can play the piano, you can play any instrument.

There is a certain way of searching for the truth in mathematics that Plato is said first to have discovered. Theon called this analysis.

I am who I am. I can't pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.

The aim of living is life itself.

I do like being surprised by directors and producers and being offered parts I would never have considered, including parts that aren't necessarily obvious but which would test me.

She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

All I can say is what I've always said: If you break your leg, stop thinking about dancing and start decorating the cast.