Even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding.

Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.

The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.

Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.

We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.

Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.

But shortcuts are dangerous; we cannot delude ourselves that our knowledge is further along than it actually is.