“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...”

“Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with al...”

“Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey th...”

“L'utilit du vivre n'est pas en l'espace: elle est en l'usage.”

“Higher-level capture devices, because they are complicated and involve novel applications of new technologies, tend to fail in unexpected ways. Thus, only after some years was it realized that Hot ...”

“Winning isn't everything--but wanting to win is.”

“Baseball is only a game, a game of inches and a lot of luck. During a time of all-out war, sports are very insignificant.”

“I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down.”

“I used to play a lot of racket sports, tennis and squash.”

“Tennis was a white, upper-class sport, and I wanted it to be treated like other sports were.”