Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

I don't care who you were. I don't care who you are and I am more concerned with who you're working to become.

A person’s irregular surfaces are what make us interesting.

For the first time in years, I have vivid dreams, vivid enough to count the stars and the number of ripples in the sea.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

I'm not too proud to change. I like to win too much.

When you meet someone for the first time, that's not the whole book. That's just the first page.

We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge.

The basis of art is change in the universe.

The White House is a bully pulpit.

His herding instinct is so strong that he confuses tractors on a baseball field for sheep. He was hospitalized twice. Once by a line drive and once for attacking a tractor tread.