... trash talk ... Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

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.

To be free, get an education. To be happy, spread compassion.

In writing, there is art. And in art, there is craft ...

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?

After all, what more does a true genius want? The mind itself is the palace where all the real treasures, the works of art, the indulgences exist.

Lead competently.Lead productively.Lead skillfully.Lead excellently.

My cousin Francis and I are in perfect accord - he wants Milan, and so do I.

Throughout my career I have been talked out of things I wanted to do, and when I look back, I think I should have followed my instincts.

I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them, and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of plants themselves.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

The Latina in me is an ember that blazes forever.