We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

Because in a split second, it’s gone.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That’s why I don’t listen to anything that’s anonymous. But it’s hard; when there’s something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.

Computers double their performance every month.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

I always keep my guard up with guys and I guess that can get in the way sometimes. I can make them go through hell.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

Everybody likes a compliment.

Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

When I’m dancing, I’m not thinking about anything. I am here. I am totally there. You know? And the feeling is a sensation of being away from myself. My soul dances with the angels, and my body dances with my wife.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I pay attention to politics and technology.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‚Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.‘

You can’t be in love with a Google search.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren’t the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.

I’m very excited about having the Internet in my den.

Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature.

There are many times when a woman will ask another girl friend how she likes her new hat. She will reply, ‚Fine,‘ but slap her hand to her forehead the minute the girl leaves to yipe, ‚What a horror!‘

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

I have an answering machine in my car. It says, I’m home now. But leave a message and I’ll call when I’m out.

We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Do the best you can, and don’t take life too serious.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice – if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.