It's the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.

I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...But this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

-But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.

The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.