“We all need to learn a new language for love – a language that speaks not in socks, pancakes, and paychecks, but in shared fascination with physics or poetry, delight in each other’s uniqueness, and mutual practical and emotional support.”

You don’t have to get it right the first time.

When you start using senses you’ve neglected, your reward is to see the world with completely fresh eyes.

Originality is genius. If you respect and care for it, it will take you on the ride of your life.

What you want is what you need. Your dearest wish comes straight from your core, loaded with vital information about who you are and who you can become.

Thinking about swimming isn’t much like actually getting in the water. Actually getting in the water can take your breath away.

Isolation is the dream killer.

Each destination you reach only opens out into wider horizons, new and undiscovered countries for you to explore.

Irreverence is a declaration of independence.

It’s essential to distinguish between events that are really beyond your control and events you caused yourself.

Whenever you do what you really love, your heart lifts, your mind opens, and everything changes. You wake up. That’s what true adventure really is.

What you love is as unique to you as your fingerprints. You need to know that because nothing will make you really happy but doing what you love.

In the days before automobiles, people in horse-drawn wagons used to sleep if they were tired. They didn’t worry about getting lost, because the horse knew the way home. Your heart knows the way to your gifts. You can trust it to take you to them.

I believe you can have whatever you really want in this life, in one form or another, sooner or later. All you have to do is take care of your health and be lucky enough to live for a while. But you can’t have it all at once and you can’t have it forever. No life has the room for everything in it, not on the same day.

You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you.

A goal is the basic unit of life design.

Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music.

Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.

We delight in one knowable thing, which comprehends all that is knowable; in one apprehensible, which draws together all that can be apprehended; in a single being that includes all, above all in the one which is itself the all.

The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

The Christian conceives of his abode on Earth in no more delightful colors than the Jainist sectarian. He sees in it only a time of sad trial; he also thinks that his true country is not of this world.

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

Formerly I regarded it miserable business to be a Christian, but now I think differently. Once I thought certain things delightful, now I think them vile. Once I thought other things utterly worthless, now I think them most precious. That is a change of mind, and that is repentance.

I am delighted to be at the heart of this team of radical reformers in Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nick Boles and many others. It’s a team I believe will deliver the change Britain needs.