“Most Christians speak to God about their mountain instead of speaking to their mountain about God!”

“Be careful how close you get to someone... It just ends up hurting more than not having no one to love to begin with.”

“So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.”

“By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolize progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken—many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if the society were working right.”

“Words and magic are two powerful forces that can change the world.”

“preparation is obviously important, but at some point, you must stop preparing content and start preparing mind-set. You have to shift from what you’ll say to how you’ll say it.”

“Contrary to what I might like to think,my life is not guided by reason;it is ruled rather by the inertia of habitual motion.”

“Maybe then he would have understood her better, understood how suffering steals the aptitude for happiness from you. Maybe he would have been okay with her melancholy then.”