“We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.”

Women have an important contribution to make.

Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

Through a grandmother’s voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning.

There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.

Don’t depend on governments or corporations to fix problems. Social revolutions are led by passionate individuals and that’s what makes the difference.

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary. to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

You can never have a relationship with someone whose smell you don’t like.

We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.

Where we choose to put our attention changes our brain, which in time can change how we see and interact with the world.

Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.

An education not founded on Art will never succeed.

The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war; but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.

The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.

Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.