“The Four Rules of Life: 1. Show Up 2. Pay Attention 3.Tell the Truth 4. Don’t be upset at the results.”

An indefinable something is to be done, in a way nobody knows how, at a time nobody knows when, that will accomplish nobody knows what.

There is that in the soul of man which must respond to the highest in virtue. It may not respond at once. Human nature can easily be over-faced by examples too remote and austere.

Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.

A nation has character only when it is free.

If the distance between ourselves and others becomes too great, we experience isolation and alienation, yet if the proximity to others becomes too close, we feel smothered and trapped.

Beauty, alone, may please, not captivate; if lacking grace, ’tis but a hookless bait.

You have to climb to reach a deep thought.

ho’ you’re tired and weary Still journey on, till you come to your happy abode, Where all you love you’ve been dreaming of Will be there, at the end of the road.

Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds?

Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions – and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

There are two kinds of pedestrians… the quick and the dead.

The price of power is responsibility for the public good.

There is convincing evidence that the search for solitude is not a luxury but a biological need. Just as humans posses a herding instinct that keeps us close to others most of the time, we also have a conflicting drive to seek out solitude.

Live constructively and live optimistically.

What’s wonderful is to read the different translations – some done in 1600 and some in 1900 – of the same passage. It’s fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.

If you’re involved in an accident and you’re at fault $500,000 may not be enough. Do you really want to lose your house because you failed to spend an extra couple of hundred bucks?

Today they forget you in five years. They give an artist nowadays four or five years and that’s it.

My name is Four,” I say. “Call me ‘Stiff’ again and you and I will have a problem.

You may leave here for four days in space, but when you return it’s the same old place.

But this mind isn’t somewhere outside the material body of the four elements. Without this mind we can’t move. The body has no awareness. Like a plant or a stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It’s the mind that moves.

What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.

If your house has been on the market for more than four months, take it off the market and re-list it in two months as ‘new.’

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and the colors around it and what it will really look like. It’s only a guess at the beginning, and then I try to refine it.