The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.

If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.

I do believe that there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.

The right-wingers don't want to admit that for some people, there are no jobs; they think that conscientiousness in and of itself will do the trick.

Everything isn't political.

You look at the world through a story. You can't help it.

The data on the economic utility of artists is really, really strong. Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people...and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system. They're absolutely necessary.
But conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the ones who drive the economy forward!

Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living -- and the Ideal shames us all.

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.

We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.

Put your family in order.

My publication record puts me in the top 0.5 percent of psychologists.

And the answer to why they're mad about the shoes is because they should change jobs.

If you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being, if you attempt to do that, then the mere act of lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you are insufficient and mortal and bound by tragedy.

People have this capacity within them to set the world straight.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

What is known and what is unknown is always relative because what is unexpected depends entirely upon what we expect (desire) -- on what we had previously planned and presumed. The unexpected constantly occurs because it is impossible, in the absence of omniscience, to formulate an entirely accurate model of what actually is happening or of what should happen.

We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.