“Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything.”

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.

Life is found in the dance between your deepest desire and your greatest fear.

In life you need either inspiration or desperation.

Passion is the genesis of genius.

Trade your expectations for appreciation and the world changes for you.

If you talk about it, it’s a dream, if you envision it, it’s possible, but if you schedule it, it’s real.

Life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

Investing in the science of food is truly an investment in our future.

People who fail focus on what they have to go through; people who succeed focus on what it will feel like at the end.

Identify your problems, but give your power and energy to solutions.

Ten years from now you’ll laugh at whatever’s stressing you out today. So why not laugh now?

The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.

It’s our unlimited power to create and love in any circumstance that makes the biggest difference in the quality of our lives.

We can get better results with ourselves and others by asking better questions.

It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird.

I love research – that’s all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That’s a serious flaw in my writing process – shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered.

Federalism is the best curb on democracy. [It] assigns limited powers to the central government. Thereby all power is limited. It excludes absolute power of the majority.

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

Concern yourself more with accepting responsibility than with assigning blame.

To bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn … seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime.

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity.