My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

... sometimes knowing sucked.

It has proved politically wiser to set goals than to start programs.

Focusing on values does not simplify your life. It gives meaning and direction-and a lot more complexity.

The fineness which a hymn or psalm affords If when the soul unto the lines accords.

Solving problems is a practical art, like swimming, or skiing, or playing the piano: you can learn it only by imitation and practice.

Money is life to us wretched mortals.

I became good at defending myself, but as far as I was concerned, that was a transient skill.

What I'd like to be above all is a writer.

To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors.