“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myri...”

“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe its because dullness is intri...”

“When people call it [depression] I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the wi...”

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worsh...”

“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits th...”

“Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, re...”

“There is no greater power than that of a laugh and happiness is a force which can save a person from the horrors of the world.”

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”

“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”

“The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deepe...”

“The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces.”

“... People were never quite what you thought they were.”

“[H]e was still young enough to think that there was something fundamentally inhuman about thinking more than one step ahead at a time.”

“...if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.”