Philosophical

The most radical act we can take is to make a commitment to a particular thing — to a place, to a profession, to a cause, to a community, to a person.

Don't just ask yourself, 'What do I want to do?' Ask yourself: 'Who do I want to be?' Because what you do will never define you. Who you are always will.

In the moment, you don't know how important a story is going to be. In the moment, you don't know if you're fighting because you're right, or if you're fighting because your ego, and your desire to win, and your notion of yourself as the hero in your own story are clouding your judgment.

Not everything in Silicon Valley or any industry or life for that matter need be portrayed as home runs or strike-outs — success or failure — it's just what you hear about so often because it's what sells newspapers.

I wish someone had told me at my own commencement that the one and only requirement for graduation was that I had to emerge out of the closed, cordoned-off space of my own head. I had to learn to listen.

We are the only species that can learn to think like another of our own species; the only one that records and remembers its history; the only one that tries to decipher the laws of the universe.

In some ways, you've always been a creature of chaos. The complications of Act II, which will tip all you have been before into chaos, have been set up and abetted by really clever foreshadowing in Act I, by all those slippery you's over the years.

Act III is everything. No matter the strength of the foundation, the assorted catastrophes of the Second Act, if we don't have Act III, we're really in trouble. Will the heroine pull it out in the end, or does she falter?

When you stop looking — or when you see only what you want — as a human being you become a stenographer.

It has always been doubt, not certainty, the constant questioning and testing of cherished assumptions, that has moved us closer to a humane and just world.

Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness.

Looking back at my ambition to become a lawyer, it looks less like a plan for the future and more like an alibi for the present.