I see nothing to fear in inner space.
The most powerful lessons occur where studies intersect with real life.
The U. S. should take notes: Government overspending and a campaign of alienating investors and small business isn't really the best way to boost the economy or overcome massive unemployment.
Government intervention is not solving the problems, and in fact the governments around the world that are intervening the most in their economies are struggling more.
We tend to let our freedoms slip away because they are tucked away in documents and policies that we don't ever deal with directly.
Until the American majority is willing to live within its means, it can hardly force its political leaders to do so.
Since the purpose of reading, of education, is to become good, our most important task is to choose the right books. Our personal set of stories, our canon, shapes our lives. I believe it is a law of the universe that we will not rise above our canon. Our canon is part of us, deeply, subconsciously. And the characters and teachings in our canon shape our characters--good, evil, mediocre, or great.
To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.
We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance – poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death – ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.