The truth is -- we are always highly motivated when something means a great deal to us. If I fell into a deep lake and I didn't know how to swim, I would become highly motivated in an instant. Climbing from the lake would mean more to me than anythin...
Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wa...
What I'm seeing is a generation that says consistently, 'I would rather text than make a telephone call.' Why? It's less risky. I can just get the information out there. I don't have to get all involved; it's more efficient. I would rather text than ...
There is beauty all around us, and the light finds us when we realize, we are all part of that beauty and worth the cherishing. If we despise any, we journey to despise ourselves. See all as beautiful, even if they choose to see themselves through yo...
I am much less autistic now, compared to when I was young. I remember some behaviors like picking carpet fuzz and watching spinning plates for hours. I didn't want to be touched. I couldn't shut out background noise. I didn't talk until I was about 4...
The typical industry approach is [retailers] to treat vendors like the enemy... If vendors can't make a profit then they don't have money to invest in research and development, which in turn means that the products they bring to the market will be le...
We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less al...
I hate that there'll be moments in my day and I'll be patting down my legs trying to find my phone. I hate how anxious it makes me feel when I don't have it. When I go on holiday, or I go back to Australia, I put my phone in my bag and I don't worry ...
Then again, given that human history appears to be defined by a succession of more or less corrupt ruling elites, and if we are to assume that such corruption (and its spread throughout society) is the mechanism by which a civilization attracts cosmi...
As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enor...
Each actor is different. When I did 'Misery,' Kathy Bates, who's a stage trained actress, loves lots of rehearsal. Jimmy Caan, who basically grew up on films, likes no rehearsal. He wants to just get in there, and whatever happens at the moment, it h...
It is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things ... I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on...
A novelist's job is almost to be a stupid as possible, except in the cunning moment when you need to structure something, when you need to be very intelligent indeed. The rest of the time, you need almost an empty mind, where you can let any image in...
Golden bars make no less a prison than a coffin on a hill. And in caged reformation, one wanders aimless still. The rafters now a recollection of sacred suppression. How the morning dawn strikes mourning confession. Now Death yields a harvest of the ...
We believe that today's younger generation, who started a global movement by camping out on Wall Street and its equivalents around the world and who are often choosing a road less traveled rather than joining the military-industrial-academic-prision ...
The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did... And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much... So you killed t...
each year, she finds her friendships less volatile and easier, because she increasingly succeeds at looking past their flaws and disappointments and homing in on their pleasures and on what set them in motion to begin with. And she wonders why she di...
Please give it up. Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it, too, may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life. [Having himself spent a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to prove Euclid's post...
The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He k...
If you happen to hold that human consciousness is no more than the epiphenomenon, or secretion, of our individual brains then you are more or less trapped in your own skull. But if consciousness is open, if it can partake in a more global form of bei...
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal Fr...
