“When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.”

Impersonal place needs something significant to fill it up.” We’ve abandoned the old belief that humanity is at the physical center of the universe but more come back to believing we are at the center of meaning.

Maybe my life isn’t great. We don’t have all the answers. Look at it from my side.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

Sometimes if you have a difficult decisin to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.

They saw the flicker of bats overhead. They smelt the drifting scent of honeysuckle, and the delicious smell of wild thyme crushed under their bodies. A reed-warbler sang a beautiful little song in the reeds below, and then another answered.

The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

You smell good, too, said patchit’s called a shower. I was staring straight ahead. When he didn’t answer, i turned sideways. Soap. Shampoo. Hot water.Naked. I know the drill.

If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.