People have been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK."

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.

Laughter is a gift everyone should open.

No matter how ill we may be nor how low we may have fallen we should not change identity with any other person.

The optimum frequency with which comedians should do a series is every year. I do one every three years. My audience is literally dying off.

Don't know which one is worse, doing your own thing or just being cool.

I think that era of mechanically figuring out of how to bring a particular evocative image to the screen was a really important part of my education.

A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth.

Compassion to an offender who has grossly violated the laws is, in effect, a cruelty to the peaceable subject who has observed them.

I resist change even as I call for it.

Writing novels is the most exciting