It's rare in an administration for a secretary of state and a secretary of defense to get along really well.

Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.

It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.

The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less.

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

man cannot control the current of events. he can only float with them and steer

Fracking is different. The risks of any single well are tiny compared to a nuclear power plant. But several hundred wells? Several thousand?

Who cares who comes out of the closet or not, so long as you're happy?

In short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.

You keep learning how to let go and to live the life that you actually have, as opposed to the life you thought you were going to have.

His first instinct was to help me, not sit like a deer in headlights, I now know that Matt isn't one to panic

There is more to us than we know. If we can be made to see it, perhaps for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to settle for less.

I will do just as you wish,' said no cat ever.

Until you can't do, you can always do more.