Born on March 9 — Quotes

There are some experiences that you can have only when you’ve lived in the same place for five years, when you’ve been with the same person for over a decade, when you’ve been working on the same skill or craft for half your lifetime. Now that I’m in my thirties, I can finally recognize that commitment, in its own way, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would otherwise never be available to me, no matter where I went or what I did.

A question: when is a bed not a bed? When it is angled lie-flat. My back hurts, my legs ache and my clothes are all rumpled - and all because the airline, which claimed to have a bed, actually offered up a torture machine which I prefer to call a slide.

What pain do you want in your life?

If we just feed ourselves rather than import foods, we will create jobs! We will create wealth!

"It was as if he had heard what I wanted," she said. But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive directions, both spiritual and philanthropic.

Because happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. Joy doesn’t just sprout out of the ground like daisies and rainbows. Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.

It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if you don’t find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.

No government has the right to inject religion into questions of citizenship. Citizenship is a privilege of people of all religions, all castes, all languages, if you're Indian.

national television broadcast a fifty-two-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim poet, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza.

I have a saying: the scandal isn't what's illegal, the scandal is what's legal.

Our culture today confuses great attention with great success, assuming them to be the same thing, but they are not. You are great, already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it's not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet ass boat. These things do not define greatness. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to.

This is the basic root of all happiness. Whether you’re listening to Aristotle or the psychologists at Harvard or Jesus Christ or the goddamn Beatles, they all say that happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production.

When a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some

The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture.<...> Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons.

Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake, that even if it hurts you today, even if it hurts others, being honest is still the right thing to do. In the same way that the adolescent realizes there’s more to the world than the child’s pleasure or pain, the adult realizes that there’s more to the world than the adolescent’s constant bargaining for validation, approval, and satisfaction. Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.