Normally, we think of the religious as people who care more, not less than the rest of us. This is not true, not exactly. The truly religious care more deeply about fewer things and do't give a hoot about the rest.

I've spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself.

Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met.... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone.

For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that- try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn't the right country for you- just won't leave you in peace.

Reason cannot account for those moments in life that "bewilder the intellect yet utterly quiet the heart," as G.K. Chesterton observed.

You look around the world at geniuses, and they don't appear randomly, they appear in genius clusters. Athens in 50 BC, Florence 1500, Silicon Valley today. This is not a coincidence.

Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him.