If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts.

People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.

Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition.

There's no doubt about it: fun people are fun. But I finally learned that there is something more important, in the people you know, than whether they are fun. Thinking about those friends who had given me so much pleasure but who had also caused me so much pain, thinking about that bright, cruel world to which they'd introduced me, I saw that there's a better way to value people. Not as fun or not fun, or stylish or not stylish, but as warm or cold, generous or selfish. People who think about others and people who don't. People who know how to listen, and people who only know how to talk.

Hence the vogue for double majors. It isn’t enough anymore to take a bunch of electives in addition to your primary focus, to roam freely across the academic fields, making serendipitous connections and discoveries, the way that American higher education was designed (uniquely, among the world’s systems) to allow you to do.

If you're oblivious to other people, chances are pretty good that you're going to hurt them.

We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty.