Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.

As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

We learn to earn and to enhance the beauty of our lives.

When we feel too drained to move forward, God is right there with us, ready to tenderly revive and restore us.

A dead heart is a dead life

Working smart is harder than working hard. It’s just less visible, and we care too much about what others see.

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

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

Somebody has to keep score and I decided I was going to do it. I'm a born score-keeper and I realize, like an umpire, that my decisions may cause distress.

The way a good rod first flexes and then extends its muscles as the line quickens, tightens, rises off the water and does figure eights in mid-air is one of the miracles of humanly applied dynamics.

I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.

Philosophy is not one truth, but thousands of truths. You don't have to believe in just one thing. When you chose one idea, you close yourself to the rest.