What's the world's greatest lie?... It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.
And the point is, is it possible for the mind to be totally free from suffering and yet not become indifferent, callous, irresponsible, but to have that passion, the intensity, the energy that freedom brings, freedom from suffering.
Each new epoch in life seems an encounter. There is a tussle and a cloud of dust, and we come out of it triumphant or crest-fallen, according as we have borne ourselves.
My aim is to understand love. I know how alive I felt when I was in love, and I know that everything I have now, however interesting it might seem, doesn't really excite me.
But love is a terrible thing: I've seen my girlfriends suffer and I don't want the same thing to happen to me. [...] Although my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of people to whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.
Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
I strongly oppose cloning, as do most Americans. We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience. And while we must devote enormous energy to conquering disease, it is equally important that we pay attention to the moral concerns raised by the new frontier of human embryo stem cell research. Even the most noble ends do not justify any means.