“Isolation is the dream killer.”

Find what you love, because greatness is based on great gifts. If you love something, you can count on the fact that you are genetically gifted at it.

You cannot tell your heart what it wants. Your heart will tell you

Unkind criticism is never part of a meaningful critique of you. Its purpose is not to teach or to help, its purpose is to punish.

When you play it too safe, you’re taking the biggest risk of your life. Time is the only wealth we’re given.

The amount of good luck coming your way depends on your willingness to act.

Sometimes life isn’t about who you were or are, but it’s about who you are becoming.

And our dreams are who we are.

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.

Whatever your dreams are, start taking them very, very seriously.

Down deep we really know our worth, but we don’t have easy access to that knowledge. We need to hear praise coming from outside ourselves or we won’t remember that we deserve it.

Real obstacles don’t take you in circles. They can be overcome. Invented ones are like a maze.

Action helps you think and raises your self-esteem. Good luck happens when you’re in action. Ask yourself, “Does this go toward or away from what I want?” There’s an animal in us, and it has great instincts. Scan for a desire and follow it. Set a goal, any goal, and start doing everything you can think of to achieve it.

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.

Veterans report that service dogs help break their isolation. People will often avert their eyes when they see a wounded veteran.

It’s funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can’t even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.

This neglect of a very important Brazilian writer is, in my view, the result of Brazil’s relative isolation from what metropolitan tastemakers.

You’re going through the horror of it, you’re going through the isolation of it but you’re being empowered by reminding yourself that you’re connected to everybody else.

The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.

The global system they hope to create is one of new walls and new isolation, and radically smaller horizons. It is an anti-democratic, anti-economic-growth, and anti-progress agenda.