“life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there.”

I’ve sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I’ve helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes;

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

You’ll be a lot less likely to be caught up in bias or prejudice or be influenced by people who ask you to hand over your brains, your soul or your money because they have everything all figured out for you.

There are two things that I get a lot of pleasure from in my life, and that is, doing what I know how to do well – that really makes me happy.

I’m greedy for that satisfaction of doing something hard and knowing that, even though I was afraid I couldn’t do it, that somehow I can deliver.

I wouldn’t live in California. All that sun makes you sterile.

I don’t really worry about the size of the part much any more.

In the midst of the sense of tragedy or loss, sometimes laughter is not only healing, it’s a way of experiencing the person that you’ve lost again.

Be brave enough to live creatively . . . what you’ll discover will be wonderful: yourself.

Begin challenging your own assumptions.

But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’

What I can’t completely understand is most other people’s fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies.

Don’t be upset that it takes a long, long time to find wisdom because nobody knows where wisdom can be found.

Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.

Jean Paul Sartre says in “No Exit” that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.

Kids are natural scientists.

The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

What you put into it is what you’re going to get out of it. If you’re getting the chance to step into the octagon, you better be going full speed and give it everything you’ve got.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.

I’m more trying to connect; I’m more listening to people. Whatever I get is very meaningful to me.

All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.