“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...”

“But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.”

“And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, hed mused, that most people will never find their call me Ishmael.”

“Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautifulGod, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as myster...”

“Any weapon's only as good as the man using it, and a good man can make a good weapon out of most anything.”

“Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else.”