“Know your worth! People always act like they're doing more for you than you're doing for them. Ask yourself this question, "Why would they do that?" Obviously, you bring something to the table for them to even do business with you”

“When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.”

“If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.”

“People get annoyed with you if you treat them like they're automatons that lack free will. It's something that people find very constraining. There's something slave-like about that even. The demand that you don't have actual autonomy and, even worse, that you're not responsible for your choices – it's an insult to someone to suggest to them that they're not responsible for their decisions. To do that to someone, from a legal perspective, you have to argue something like diminished capacity. You are mentally ill, or you don't have the intellectual capacity, or you were under some substance, or you had a brain injury, and that's why you're not responsible for your actions. Part of the respect that you give other human beings is that you acknowledge that they are responsible for their actions. Part of that, too, is that if you do something good, you're also responsible for that. It's got to be more annoying than anything else to strive virtuously, to produce something of extreme value, and then to be treated as if it is a mere deterministic outcome, and that your actual choices had nothing to do with that. It can be extraordinarily punishing.”

“Ask yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: What do believe in? What do you hope for? What do you love?”

“The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?”

“When the physicist poses the question, "What does it mean to do physics?" or "What is research in physics?" — his question is a preliminary question. Clearly, when you ask a question like that, and try to answer it, you are not "doing physics." Or rather you are no longer doing physics. But when you ask yourself, "What does it mean to do philosophy?" then you actually are "doing philosophy" — this is not at all a "preliminary" question but a truly philosophical one: you are right at the heart of the business.”

“I know it's important to do more than just complain when there's something you don't like. You need to try to do something about it, or you're nothing but a whiner.”

“When you follow your emotional guidance system with the awareness that your inner compass can be ‘faulty’ you will be able to question yourself in the spirit of curiosity and the desire to be totally aware… You will ask yourself WHY something feels good to do.”

“Why won't anyone ever answer my questions?"
"Because you never stop asking them and especially because you keep asking them even when it's clear that nobody knows the answers."
"Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?”