“By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn’t give a damn what you like. So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things.”

When two intelligent parties disagree, that’s when the potential for learning and moving ahead begins.

I believe that dreamers who simply imagine things that would be nice but are not possible don’t sufficiently appreciate the laws of the universe to understand the true implications of their desires, much less how to achieve them.

Radical transparency fosters goodness in so many ways for the same reasons that bad things are more likely to take place behind closed doors.

The big question is: When will the term structure of interest rates change? That’s the question to be worried about.

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.

People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don’t know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future.

Remember that experience creates internalization. Doing things repeatedly leads to internalization, which produces a quality of understanding that is generally vastly superior to intellectualized learning.

Forget about what the technology is. Just understand the motivation behind it.

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you’ll be.

I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.

Successful people ask for the criticism of others and consider its merit.

What matters most is that the people you work with share your values.

Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them – i.e., reflecting – if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.

The media has the power to create an entrenched perception of reality that’s incorrect.

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.

Some nights, alone, he thinks of her, and some nights, alone, she thinks of him. Some night these thoughts, separated by miles and time zones, occur at the same objective moment, and Ray and Mirabelle are connected without ever knowing it.

We need to understand the hierarchy of connections. Ultimately, we must connect to something above ourselves such as God. This can give us the power to spread happiness and joy around the world.

I wanted to connect all people who are thinking about peace on Earth.

What is important is that we stop and realize, “Okay. This is fine. I can enjoy that. But what is really important, what I’m really going to take away with me from this life, is my connection with other people.

From the moment you put a piece of bread in your mouth you are part of the world. Who grew the wheat? Who made the bread? Where did it come from? You are in relationship with all who brought it to the table. We are least separate and most in common when we eat and drink.

Life will keep on, even when there’s no love in the relationship, but it can never connect the relationship.

You know that only thing that has made the whole thing worthwhile has been those few times that I was able to truly connect with another person.

You are in my blood no one can break this bond.