My colleague Ross Douthat wrote that any time you give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, he always lets you down.

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.

Dreams without deadlines are dead in the water. Deadlines are really lifelines to achieving our goals.

Fantasy or fiction is just a persons secret life. A world they want to be in. The only diffrence between them and you, is that they wrote it down in detail, printed it and shared it with the world.

I feel like there's more of a need to tell more optimistic stories.

Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is his continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.

I have a terror of things being nice and knowing what to expect. Making a photograph is a license to have experiences that I would not otherwise have.

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

I'm actually not someone who believes in heaven or anything like that.

The purpose of a doctor or any human in general should not be to simply delay the death of the patient, but to increase the person's quality of life.

A pillow for thee will I bring,Stuffed with down of angel's wing.