People ask, quite legitimately, why [Betsy] DeVos and why not a lot of the others? But it's because it has to do with the special interest groups that run a lot of Washington.

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.

I feel like a stranger in my own world.

Love? Love is like holding water in your hands. You might have it for a time, but it escapes, leaving you with nothing.

But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.

One day, I just got up to read a poem and started singing. I looked around - the reaction was great. And I said, oh, boy. I like this.

The smartest thing legislatures can do is get rid of lotteries and get those dollars buying consumer goods and get the sales tax revenues from that

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

We are never more self-righteous than when giving up what we should have shunned all along.

Learn to recognize and combat the enemies of potential.

The only defense against evil, violent people is good people who are more skilled at violence.

I slipped at a bus stop; I went one way and my hair went the other. That was the end of my wig.