Squibs

People thrive when they have a sense of (1) belonging, (2) predictability, and (3) community.

Throughout history, the percentage of women who go their whole lives without having children rarely dipped below 10%, even among the most enthusiastic breeding societies. It was 23% in 1920s America. (From Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed)

Nerves and focus go hand in hand.

Because growth curves are asymptotic, I am convinced it is better to get pretty good at a lot of things rather than investing your scarce time in becoming marginally better at a couple of things.

The main lesson of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is that snap judgments can be effective only if not clouded by prejudices, and that prejudices can be trained out of us.

Whenever you start to use words like 'always' and 'never' you have murdered any chance of intellectual discourse.

I am not sure I agree with this, but it's an interesting hypothesis: Everyone has a default emotion.

"Giants of science not only can tell the immediate meaning of their findings but can also extrapolate their broader implications." -Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel. I suspect this is true for a much broader swath of disciplines than just science.

To philosophize is to learn how to die (so we can learn how to live).

Describing something seriously impairs your ability to visually recognize it because we have two parts of memory -- words and pictures -- and describing something makes words replace pictures.

"Make the certainty of your mortality structure the life that you live freely now."