The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people's psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer.

Families survive the terrible twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons.

Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

Our best hope for the future [...] lies in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

A religion such as Judaism or Catholicism might survive even if it comes to reject a literal account of God creating man and animals. But it cannot survive the rejection of an immaterial soul.

I argue that we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but that empathy leads us astray.

The fact that something can be used for good isn't necessarily a knockdown argument for it.

Empathy zooms you in on an individual and, as a result, it's narrow, it's innumerate, it's racist, it's very biased.

I love teaching. I wouldn't take a job that didn't include it.

What I mean by "empathy" is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling what they feel.

I think empathy is really important for pleasure.

Be fearless to live life.

Malnutrition can be as common in poverty as in wealth, one for the lack of food, the other for the lack of knowledge of food.

Maybe someday, I'd find someone who'd prove he really loved me. Someone who'd hold me rather than let me fall. Someone who'd never lie to me.

Every person alive thinks they are the center of the universe, that they are everything, when in fact each of us is less than nothing.

When I use the word spirituality I don't necessarily mean religion I mean whatever it is that helps you feel connected to something that is larger than yourself.

The first movie that made me cry was Dead Poets Society. That one gets me. O Captain! My Captain! That moment kills me.

If you lose your reason, you lose it into the hands of God....It's the only place where anything is safe. And when you're dead it's only what's there you'll have. Nothing else.

The most important thing in the face is the eyes, and if you can make the eyes talk, you're halfway there.

In a way, there's nothing wrong with playing the piano, but it's not a huge trauma if you don't.

At the beginning of a love affair, not even the neurotic is neurotic.