One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all.

The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something

Physicist Isador Isaac Rabi, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing a technique that permitted scientists to probe the structure of atoms and molecules in the 1930s, attributed his success to the way his mother used to greet him when he came home from school each day. "Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?" she would say.

A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England

When I have the choice to do something I don't want to do, I most often – most always – do it anyway.

People never forget things, they just never remembered it in the first place because it was too boring

My opening line to my students, and a recurring theme in my classes, was that the big design problem isn't designing a house for your parents or yourself, a museum, or a toaster, or a book, or whatever. The big design problem is designing your life. It's by the design of your life that you create the backboard off which you bounce all your thoughts and ideas and creativity. You have to decide what it is that you want to do each day.