“The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.”

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.

The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

Forethought and prudence are the proper qualities of a leader. [Lat., Ratio et consilium, propriae ducis artes.]

Reason and judgment are the qualities of a leader.

Bodies are slow of growth, but are rapid in their dissolution. [Lat., Corpora lente augescent, cito extinguuntur.]

Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished.

I find ways to make things affordable. If the kids want the looks, they can be able to go afford it.

So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.