The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.

No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.

Ah, yes, crooked paths often end in quicksand.

He has not a single redeeming defect.

One always talks of surrendering to nature. There is also such a thing as surrendering to the picture.

The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.

The essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic.

Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference we should each be treated with appropriate respect.

There was something peculiarly gratifying about shouting in a blind rage until your words ran out.

Something is going to have to happen. Not necessarily something big. Just something.

Who you love is an illustration of you... but whomever loves you back is you... in HD.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.