There's many a slip twixt the blueprints and a new house.
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.
The love of fame is a love that even the wisest of men are reluctant to forgo.
I think the idea of Mary Poppins has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.
The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.