Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

When we truly need to do is often what we most feel like avoiding.

[S]ound policy condemns the practice of accumulating debts.

Use God's mighty weapons, not those made by men, to knock down the devil's strongholds.

Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.

That home run ties it up, 1-0.

When you're doing a Broadway show, you have no free time.

I'll always continue to work. I've never much depended on anyone but myself, as far as that goes.

Life is not about win-and-lose. Life is about being or not being, expressing or not expressing, who you are.

Turkey, Australia, and Japan are three of my top destinations.