“Don’t use language instrumentally.”

It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.

To act is literally to manifest preference about one set of possibilities, contrasted with an infinite set of alternatives. If we wish to live, we must act. Acting, we value.

That’s poetic in its malevolence.

Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such a position were too great to be resisted.

What you aim at determines what you see.

Worthlessness is the default condition.

Consciousness is a mystery that faces the mystery of potential and transforms it into actuality. We do that with every choice we make. Our choices determine the destiny of the world. By making a choice, you alter the structure of reality.

If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.

It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.

The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things.

One of the problems with being relatively wealthy if you are a parent is that you cannot provide your children with necessity.

And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.

If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.

Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word.

In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.

You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded,” to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future.

I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.

The language of the Church Of England still reflects that Victorian time.

Love is the language of the soul when it is not colored by emotion, ego, or attachment.

Our language and symbols are always incomplete versions of a greater reality.

I don’t speak anything very well. The longer that you travel, you find out that you really don’t even need to speak the language to get around and get things done, to live in those places.

But we’ve got all the language wrong and made this divide between secularism and spirituality, whereas instead it’s about being human.