“The main idea of personal happiness at that [Colonial] time was not some hedonistic notion of pleasure but the other, more philosophical, kind. The Greek philosophers believed that discovering one's own talents and then taking the pleasure of exploiting them (finding out that you had a singing voice, could write well, start a company, or invent new things), that was the deeper pleasure the founders had in mind and the freedom they sought.”

“...most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossils and wrote about botany and invented household tools and studied animals. He was an amateur anthropologist and even an amateur theologian who famously cut all the miracles out of the New Testament because he thought Jesus made a whole lot more sense without the supernatural material mucking up the good moral philosophy.”

“Evolution has one big rule: If there's no pressure on the system to change, then it doesn't bother.”

“..the universe is not plagued by intentions and purpose.”

“There had been an attempt to humiliate him. It had not succeeded. He had paid, but pain, like pleasure, has no duration. Pride was an entity more persistent.”

“The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.”

“I had discovered something; there was a pleasure in becoming something new. You could will yourself into a fresh shape. Now all I had to do was figure out how to do it out there, in my life.”