“The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.”

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

I want to be respected as a guy who knows what he’s talking about. And that, to me, holds more weight than anything else.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies.

Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.

I don’t think there’s been anything in the game of football in my lifetime that has changed college football more than redshirting.

The maternal duty of suckling her own children, prescribed to mothers by hygienists, is based on a physiological principle: the mother’s milk nourishes an infant more perfectly than any other.

If the Indy Racing League didn’t have the Indianapolis 500, do you think it would have lasted more than six months? No chance.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.