When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.

My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.

If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.

Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

Dying is Easy, its Living that's hard

I donated blood today. That's what I call getting an AIDS test.

My culture-deprived, aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it.

Art can make chaos seductive.

Children, for whom suburban life was supposed to make wholesome little Johns and Wendys, became the acid-dropping, classroom-burning hippies of the 1960s.

The American dream. Those three short, simple words encompass the hopes and aspirations of all the peoples on earth. The words are not only short and simple. They are also fragile.

A symptom of the revolution: When we state something is impossible in theory, but then change our minds when we discover that it is possible in practice.

I didn't even graduate from high school. I've never told anybody that before. I got my degree later, when I was in the army.

What’s the best way to build a brand for the long term? In a word: culture.

Great men have been among us; hands that penn'd And tongues that utter'd wisdom--better none