Some places are like family. They annoy us to no end, especially during the holidays, but we keep coming back for more because we know, deep in our hearts, that our destinies are intertwined.

what doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest.

[Happiness is] a ghost, it’s a shadow. You can’t really chase it. It’s a by-product, a very pleasant side effect to a life lived well.

If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time.

When you're stuck on something creatively, you can't solve a problem, you go to a coffee shop.

We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback. There is a word for this; love.

God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.

I've always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics and creative genius.

Happiness is not a noun or a verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.

I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.

A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change.

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it

If you take from the rich you give the rich less incentive. If you give what you have taken from the rich to the poor, you make the poor more dependent. Nobody wins.

We've all listened to Dr. Laura Schlessinger, haven't we? We all know how not to play a psychiatrist.

The amount of time people waste dwelling on failures rather than putting that energy into another project, always amazes me

Percy’d heard stories about amputees who had phantom pains where their missing legs and arms used to be. That’s how his mind felt—like his missing memories were aching.

A mind content both crown and kingdom is.

You can create art and beauty with a computer.

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.