Two individuals, conversing honestly, can be inspired by the feeling that they are engaged in a joint enterprise, aiming at inventing an art which has not been tried before.

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.

Never before have humans been so ambitious, have they thought that they could be much more than their parents were.

Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.

The great thing about marriage is that it creates trust, the most precious of things.