Stop wishing for things you complain you have not, and start making the best of all that you've got.
I've been poor and neglected, in the middle and cherished, then rich and miserable and back to the middle and now happy. I've lived it all.
San Francisco is poetry. Even the hills rhyme.
Nature has a way of deadening us to traumatic events, until we're ready to deal with it. And once you do, it's a volcanic reaction.
My mother was the tough-as-nails disciplinarian who showed very little to no emotion. My father, on the other hand, was a study in contradiction. He was the fire, hell, and brimstone preacher, while also being incredibly gentle and forward thinking. I identify with him a lot.
I've always been very outspoken and a supporter of the underdog, because I'm one as well. I
Thanks to my son, I've learned to laugh at myself. Laughter has been my saving grace.
To criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology transfer.
I see a lot of patterns in our behavior as a nation that parallel a lot of other historical processes.
Many of us struggle with ideas that come to our head from our self-identification.
The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.