The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

He doesn't yearn for a better, different life than the one he has - because he knows he's got a home in this one.

What a man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.

I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true!

I wanted to get that sense of peace and even boredom that comes with long familiarity.

it was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. i wanted to be the last one she loved.

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

If people are saying that somehow their connection is going to be detrimental to their health, of course they are going to reject that idea, because that's the power of falling like that.

It's all about a balancing act between time, temperature and ingredients: That's the art of baking.

I wish to confess my sins and I wish Christ to come into my life.

One can hardly help another to the top of the hill without climbing there himself.