We have two strategies for coping; the way of avoidance or the way of attention.

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by agreement or by emotional appeal.

Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.

The mind aware of itself is a pilot... vastly freer than a passenger mind.

Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order.

The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.

The other side of every fear is a freedom.

Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.

Risk always brings its own rewards: the exhilaration of breaking through, of getting to the other side; the relief of a conflict healed; the clarity when a paradox dissolves.

Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context.

Our biggest failure is our failure to see patterns.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights

There's always two ways of looking at things... that seeing what's positive about a situation is a lot more fun and gets you a lot further than looking for what might be wrong with it.

Being pregnant was a lot like being a child again. There was always someone telling you what to do.

The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'

I turn the good parts up and the bad parts down

A lot of people know that something very drastic has happened to the very idea of America.

Other people are joyous, like on the feast of the ox, like on the way up to the terrace in the spring. I alone am inert, giving no sign, like a newborn baby who has not learned to smile.

Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness

Your rules should arise out of your passions and your experience with what works for you.

With rap, it's a funny thing. You can say things, and people can take 'em the way they wanna take 'em.