In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.

Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.

When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington’s birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.