Short naps are good. Given modern workplace demands, this is not possible for many people - but if you have the option, try napping for ten to twenty minutes in the afternoon, preferably lying down in a darkened room.

The underlying idea is that you can prevent disease by balancing your body's pH... None of these claims are true. Furthermore, your body needs absolutely no help in adjusting its pH. Normally, the pH of blood and most body fluids is near seven, which is close to neutral. This is under very tight biological control because all of the chemical reactions that maintain life depend on it. Unless you have serious respiratory or kidney problems, body pH will remain in balance no matter what you eat or drink.

Fear and greed are potent motivators. When both of these forces push in the same direction, virtually no human being can resist.

Just the attempt to learn a [new] language is like running different software through the brain.

Dreaming is a phenomenon of purely individual consciousness, and consequently impossible to thoroughly deconstruct by a community of researchers. But dreaming matters.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

I've always been called "controversial." I think if I were not controversial I wouldn't be doing my job.