If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim.

The only true law is that which leads to freedom.

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.

Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.

There were times in my life when I said, "Oh God, I'm making a terrible, terrible mistake here." And on another level it looked as if that's exactly what I had done. All of us can look back across our lives and see what we thought was a disaster was actually a blessing - from a long-term perspective, it was a blessing. With practice, we can shorten the length of time between "what a dumb mistake I've made" and "what a brilliant choice that was.