“If you detect something mindless about American education, it's because the mind has been taken out of it. Only visible behavior counts.”

“It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out.”

“Anyone who tells you money can't buy happiness never had any.”

“Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker's admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by "Raffles" and "Sherlock Holmes," or the sentiments for which they stand. He belonged to a family which had never shot a fox. 'I am an amateur,' said Lord Peter”

“Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then can you detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.”

“The thing about capturing a prize fish is that everyone admires the fish, and soon forgets about the fisherman. You love the thing that makes you special, then hate it because it's the thing that makes you special.”

“When you start reconnecting with these missing [parts of yourself], you tend to realize that, until then, you had never really been incarnated on the planet. You thought you were, but if one considers the totality of your being, you were hardly there. You were literally all over space. The result was that you were sleeping your life instead of living it. Only when a gathering of all the parts has taken place inside your heart can you be fully present and find your real purpose on earth.”