Philosophy

Success leads to the greatest failure, which is arrogance and pride. Failure can lead to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

The right reason to go to college is so you can find new ways to awe yourself by reflecting on how fascinating the world we live in is. We are actually on a giant rock hurling through space. It's a crazy interesting world we are living in.

These stories we tell about ourselves — they're almost like our infrastructure, like railroads or highways. We can build them almost any way we want to. But once they're in place, this whole inner landscape grows up around them.

As important as freedom of expression is — and it most surely is — so too it is important to know what it is we want to express, and why.

The first steps toward non-violence, which is surely an absolute obligation we all bear, is to begin to think carefully and to ask others to do the same.

There is no solution to a problem that does not embrace all that we have created as a species.

If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. That will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better.

Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

Be hard on your opinions. A famous bon mot asserts opinions are like assholes in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this but I would add that opinions differ significantly from assholes in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

A generation is not 'youth.' Youth is just an age bracket. It's like an empty hotel room that different generations move into — with their own baggage — and then soon leave. Sometimes that room swells with sweet music, sometimes it throbs with death metal, sometimes it's utterly silent. But it's never the same.

If everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.

You can never be truly free if you do not join efforts to free someone else. The function of freedom is always to free someone else.