Everyone is born sincere and dies deceivers.

Lazy people are always anxious to be doing something.

We are so presumptuous that we think we can separate our personal interest from that of humanity, and slander mankind without compromising ourselves.

The shortness of life cannot dissuade us from its pleasures, nor console us for its pains.

The young suffer less from their own errors than from the cautiousness of the old.

You are not born for fame if you don't know the value of time.

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

Action makes more fortune than caution.

Courage is adversity's lamp.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

Who knows until we experience it? I think that heaven and reincarnation are both ways of making us feel better about what happens to people's souls after death. I hope at least one of them is true.

Being in love is highly overrated.book: stuff i think about

We are coming into a new era of flight, an ear in which all past conception of time and distance is changing and changing at a very, very rapid rate.

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state.

The world will be saved by beauty.

Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.

Being a writer now is about so much more than writing. There's publishing, touring, marketing, web presence.

I'd learned a thing or two. Hope strengthens. Fear kills.