A person in torment is not going to give you anything.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.

Philosophers should be, as Seneca put it, 'lawyers for humanity'. Make what you think and feel count; the examined life has global dimensions.

But the life that no longer trust another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer.

You can’t really change the heart without telling a story.

As human beings, we ought to be vulnerable. We shouldn't try to say that we can be self-sufficient or do everything that's necessary for a good life on our own, because we need other people.

Life is about more than earning a living, and if you're not in the habit of thinking about it, you can end up middle-aged or even older and shocked to realize that your life seems empty.

Business leaders love the humanities because they know that to innovate you need more than rote knowledge. You need a trained imagination.

Choice matters. You might have the opportunity to eat a nutritious diet, though you might choose to eat a lousy diet. What matters is the opportunity.

How am I going to explain to my kids one day that I can't buy them a happy meal because the toy will make them fat?

Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.

How plotless real life was!

I can't believe I've been doing it so long. In the last three or four years, I've slowed down. I'm doing only the roles I really want to do.

And over time, I think, as Iraqi security capacity builds, you'll see American and coalition presence there decline.

...once I falsely hoped to meet the beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.

Women don't question themselves when they enter into a story that has male characters, but men do question the validity of a female narrative.

No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.

So the self under the eye lies, Attendant and withdrawn.