I was a student at Yale and wrote a paper about the computerized society that was on the horizon. ... Then I sort of let that lie. I didn’t get a particularly good grade on it, as I recall.

They’re not failures, you try something and it doesn’t work, and some people, you know, get fed up with this, and I’ve known some of my friends and colleagues who have just decided to give up science because they can’t stand it, but I’ve always decided, you know, if it doesn’t work, forget it and start planning the next experiment, and that’s always exciting.

I got quite nice results in my one-question studies, but never wrote up any of the work, because I had set myself impossible standards: in order not to pollute the literature, I wanted to report only findings that I had replicated in detail at least once, and the replications were never quite perfect. I realized only gradually that my aspirations demanded more statistical power and therefore much larger samples than I was intuitively inclined to run. This observation also came in handy some time later.

In fact, what I usually say to people, “Probably some of the most successful scientists are the ones that know how to deal with failure well.” Because it’s easy to feel good when you succeed. That’s an easy thing. But you’re probably going to fail in science a lot more than you succeed, so you really have to learn how to deal with it and not let it beat you.

Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.

They win the respect, the deserved trust, of the people they deal with, and there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust. And so the way to get it is to deliver what you’d want to buy if the circumstances were reversed.

I realized very early that non-egality would work better in the parts of the world I wanted to inhabit. What do I mean by non-egality? I mean John Wooden, when he was the number one basketball coach in the world. He just said to the bottom five players, “You don't get to play. You're sparring partners.” The top seven did all the playing.

wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty.

if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not enter.

inversion frequently will solve problems which nothing else will solve. And in life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that you can't solve in other ways.