How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?

We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

The self is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state.

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.

The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.

Every breath is a sacred life.

Even for the dead I will not bind my soul to grief, death cannot long divide; for is it not as if the rose that climbed my garden wall had bloomed the other side?

You don't have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.

Gloriously false. [Like Rahab.]

You have to find hope. Hope is such a shape shifter. You tend to look in the rearview mirror for hope, but when its gone, you have to look forward. You have to get in the van and keep driving on.

Is puppy love the reason so many Americans are blind to the incompetence and waste of Republicans - who at a minimum are supposed to be good money managers - running Iraq reconstruction?

There is sometimes only a very fine line between deliberation and procrastination.

Each generation makes it's own accounting to its children.

That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.

Your body considers alcohol a toxin and will basically stop trying to digest food you ate to get rid of the alcohol and this can cause the food you ate throughout the day to be stored as fat.