If you're an older sibling and you have a younger sibling who needs mentoring or is afraid of the dark, you develop nurturing and empathic skills that you wouldn't otherwise have.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

My music doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's a script and there's an actor and it's about to come together.

I hope I'm going to act for the rest of my life. What scares me is that if I get a big head, my mum said she would take me out of the business instantly - and if you knew my mum, she would do it!

The moment you say yes to acting on your desire is the real beginning.

Even a tourist can tell in a Roman street that he is in something and not outside of something as he would be in most cities. In Rome to go out is to go home.

On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greater than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare, for he would haveheld up his head in their company.

There's a little bit more of a freedom when you're doing radio play-by-play as opposed to television. I prefer the television side of it.

A tragedy can turn out to be our greatest good if we approach it in ways which we can grow.

Trust me on this: no one is better off alone.

Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality.

Nobody really lives in the present.