most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.

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.

Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing.

My grandmother and I saw an average of eight movies a week, double features, second run.

restraint equals indulgence

As a professional actor, I don't have much choice about what I've gotten into. I tend to be cast in comedies and I'm fine with that.

My soul was always so full of aspirations, that a God was a necessity to me. I was like a bird with an instinct of migration upon me, and a country to migrate to was as essential as it is to the bird

I love religions and find them fascinating, and I find Judaism very beautiful. It's enriched my life enormously.

Tell your story because your story will heal you and it will heal someone else.

I'm half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That's why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I've seen so many.

Number 45 doesn't explode like Number 23 used to.

Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.