If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

Ô, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.

Like a flower, be soft, loving, kind, and beautiful, but never lose the courage to bloom.

It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.

God is a good paymaster

There is no greater power than the power of love

There is a vast difference between intellectual belief and the total conversion that saves the soul.

How fast you are moving is more important than where you are.

With the American failure came world failure.

Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.