I came to America from Canada because Canada is stultifyingly boring and incredibly hypocritical.
It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
Unless a person knows how to give order to her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.
Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk-the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behaviour, the second can wilt if not cultivated.
Happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen.
For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.
Find a way to express what moves you.
You win them to what you win them with.
The most powerful sign is that your work no longer enchants you - it's not deep, delightful, and mutually satisfying. When this happens, it may be time to look for new challenges.
No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural.
We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.