I love teaching. I wouldn't take a job that didn't include it.

Families survive the terrible twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons.

Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

Our best hope for the future [...] lies in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

A religion such as Judaism or Catholicism might survive even if it comes to reject a literal account of God creating man and animals. But it cannot survive the rejection of an immaterial soul.

I argue that we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but that empathy leads us astray.

The fact that something can be used for good isn't necessarily a knockdown argument for it.

Empathy zooms you in on an individual and, as a result, it's narrow, it's innumerate, it's racist, it's very biased.

The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people's psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer.

What I mean by "empathy" is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling what they feel.

I think empathy is really important for pleasure.

We all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.

Adversity is a better educator than the best teacher.

Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.

To learn true humility, we need more than a redefinition of greatness; we need even more than Jesus' personal example of humble service. What we need is His death.

Thoughtfulness is the way to deathlessness, thoughtlessness the way to death. The thoughtful do not die: the thoughtless are as if dead already.

We've increasingly lost that sense of community, of the notion that there is something we contribute to and benefit from that is called the common good.

There are certain things I do not talk about.

Figure out how to build a brand and stick by it so people know what to expect.

Love is the eternally burning fire in which humanity & all the world are being purified.

If there has not been such a thing as gymnastics, I would have had to invent it because I feel at one with the sport.