In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.

What's the whole point of being pretty on the outside when you’re so ugly on the inside?

We have the right and the responsibility to be intolerant of those things which should not be tolerated.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?

Long exercise, my friend, inures the mind; And what we once disliked we pleasing find.

I'm past patiently waitin,' I'm passionately smashin' every expectation, every action's an act of creation.

Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.

I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap. Probably not even real

In basketball - as in life - true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way.

To understand any living thing, you must, so to say, creep within and feel the beating of its heart.