The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

If there are no books. There is no civilization.

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it. That's when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality.

Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.

We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God's fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for 'the bush was not consumed.

The only things worth seeing are beyond what you can actually see.

A big part of dealing with depression is realizing that you are in control of your own happiness.

In pursuing a ‘way, ’ Japanese typically move beyond an interest in craftsmanship to a kind of sacred search for the ultimate.

Behind every communication problem is a sweaty ten-minute conversation that you don't want to have.

I'm not worried about Instagram.

I took a bottle of pills. I'd been in Europe and I had a lot of absinthe and I was just drinking and drinking, trying to, you know, just shut my body down.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

The flu can definitely set you up for bacterial pneumonias.

I'd like to think that the best bunker buster is a diplomat.

I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.