You don't have to be a chef or even a particularly good cook to experience proper kitchen alchemy: the moment when ingredients combine to form something more delectable than the sum of their parts.
My parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity in Australia. For the meagre sum of £10, you could sail your entire family out to Australia, so that's what my father chose to do.
A lot of people, including business leaders, think the future belongs to China. Globalization is not a zero-sum game, but we need to hone our skills to stay in play.
The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.
The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.
I started out doing music videos and photography, and I always loved writing. Filmmaking seemed to be a good compilation of all these skills in a way that allowed me to tell a story 'greater than the sum of its parts.'
Authority figures are so irritating. Because they always tell you to do things for reasons that aren't very good. That sums up what authority is about for me.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
The sum total of all my stop-starts have made me less concerned about the future. I'm just aware now that I'll always land on my feet somehow.
I believe that when an elder dies, a library is burned: vast sums of wisdom and knowledge are lost. Throughout the world libraries are ablaze with scant attention.
As we abide in sleep, intuitively resonating with the sum of all our experiences - this life and beyond - we gain refreshing perspective on our efforts and have an opportunity to remember what we know.
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
They used to complain at school that I looked out of the window for long periods of time - that sums up my life. I like to look out the window, do nothing, daydream.
I suppose you could sum up the religious aspects of my boyhood by saying it was a time of life when I was taught the difference between right and wrong as it specifically applied to Catholicism.
Some say that our lives are defined by the sum of our choices. But it isn't really our choices that distinguish who we are. It's our commitment to them.
Real people do real things. A collective of a whole bunch of people who do things in their own locale, in their own neighborhoods - the sum is bigger than the parts, and the parts will grow.
This idea of how everything is interconnected, and the impermanence of things.. It sums up the human condition to me, and it helps me on my path.
No one can sum up all God is able to accomplish through one solitary life, wholly yielded, adjusted, and obedient to Him.
Much of our national debate proceeds as if China and America were locked in a zero-sum game in which one's loss is precisely the other's gain.
I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles' faces on it. It would be a collector's item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.
New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.
