What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.

Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.

It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.

The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less.

That's kind of a leap, but the Russian judge gave you a nine point five for style, so okay.

Self-knowledge is the greatest kind of knowledge.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Write what you know. Write what you want to know more about. Write what you're afraid to write about.

Paradise is a state of consciousness. All you have to do is purify yourself and you automatically arrive.

Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

Flirting with death is the spice of life.

All I ever do is learn from my mistakes so I don't make the same ones again. Then I make new ones.

I would rather create a precedent than find one.