Find what you love to do, what you're good at and passionate about and then dedicate your entire life to working hard at it. I wil say it again. Work hard. I mean that. Even if you're not sure where that work will lead, even if it is underappreciated...
After all, as it says on a needlepoint sampler or throw pillow or the occasional bumper sticker: Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere. In high heels. Or mules by Manolo Blahnik, the strappy, tangly kind that give you blisters. And whe...
When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observa...
Hardy studied me for another long moment. A smile curled one corner of his mouth. 'I can give you some pointers. Lord knows you couldn't get any worse.' 'Mexicans can't play basketball,' I said. 'I should be given a waiver because of my heritage.' Wi...
When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidl...
The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is chea...
What I tried to make clear in Good Calories, Bad Calories was that nutrition and obesity research lost its way after the Second World War with the evaporation of the European community of scientists and physicians that did pioneering work in those di...
[Alex has just struck Dim on the legs] Dim: What did you do that for? Alex: For being a bastard with no manners, and not a dook of an idea how to comport yourself public-wise, O my brother. Dim: I don't like you should do what you done, and I'm not y...
Solomon Northup: We need a sympathetic ear. If we have an opportunity to explain our situation... Clemens: Who in your estimation is that sympathetic ear? Solomon Northup: The two men I journeyed with. I'm certain they're making inquires at this very...
The air was filled with beings, flying hither and thither in otherworldly haste, and shouting as they went. Half of them were – if Scrooge could put words to it – darkness and evilness incarnate: squat, short beings with owl-like bodies and monke...
Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Acti...
Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. W...
I've attended seven schools in ten years," I explain. "So you can rest assured I know you. You're the girl who thinks being cruel is the same thing as being witty. You think being loud is the same thing as being right. And, most of all, you're the gi...
Did he understand, as those interminable minutes ticked by, that being alone is not the same as being lonely? That being alone is a neutral state; it is like a blind fish at the bottom of the ocean without eyes, and therefore without judgement. Is it...
Imagine saying to somebody that you have a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, and being told to pull yourself together or get over it. Imagine being terribly ill and too afraid to tell anyone lest it destroys your career. Imagine being admitte...
Presence is about how every action can arise from the quality, which we call awareness – the presence of our inner being, the presence of our soul. It is a large difference between working with people from the inner being and working with people fr...
It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imp...
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any concepti...
Being Happy on Purpose is about making a conscious decision in each moment to move towards happiness. It is not about a perfect life. It is not about having things. It is about creating YOUR experience and being open to the beauty, joy, and abundance...
Every human being wants to be seen, really seen, by another human being, not as a statistic in some sociological study, not as a casualty of poverty, not as a victim of a corrupt social structure. We can start by seeing both what is and what can be.
In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if...
