“It's nice to be important, but it's also important to be nice. Never forget that.”

“Sex can lead to nasty things like herpes, gonorrhea, and something called relationships.”

“It's important that you identify what the best things are in your life. The things that do more than just get you through the day. The things that make you want the next day to come. And once you identify those things, it's critical that you nurture them and keep them strong.”

“It's so easy to for tragedy to defeat you. It's seductive in the way that I heard freezing to death is. Being consumed by grief is in many ways much more comfortable than battling your way out of it - especially when you realize that no matter how hard you fight you can't reverse the situation you're grieving over. But it's so important to engage in the battle anyway. It's really the only way to stay alive.”

“empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.”

“I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.”

“It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.”