"We are born into this precious human existence to achieve the uni cation of opposites and become enlightened, or liberated, from the illusion of separation."

"To make matters worse, Jackson placed great value on regurgitating every last detail of the assigned texts. When, in response to Jackson's question 'What are the three simple machines?' a cadet answered, 'The inclined plane, the lever, and the wheel,' Jackson replied, 'No, sir. The lever, the wheel, and the inclined plane."

"The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather 'opens things up to the light of Heaven' by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to 'illumine,' for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over."

"I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone."

"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

"According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age."