Learn to detest things that do not allow you to be yourself, and embrace things that make that self larger, more thrilling, and voluptuous.

Hold the door for an old man. Old ladies can take care of themselves; they've been doing it long enough.

The god that you dispense with today, will come back as a demon tomorrow.

Eat without the TV going on. Learn to appreciate food with only the entertainment of conversation-yours and someone else's.

Start a conversation with someone with whom you have "nothing in common" and no possibility of scoring with, networking with, or even seeing again. In other words, a conversation just for the civilized hell of it.

Oscar Wilde said that the gods punish us in two ways: first, they don't give us what we want, then, they do. He forgot the third way: we finally see the cost of getting it.

We think of death and loss as tragic twins, but in fact it is loss that hurts us.