What have you come to understand about what it means to be human?

People just were the mysterious sum of their actions.

In our lives, we do our best to serve our community well, behave decently, and treat people well.

So you are always confronted with life, with somebody’s life, not just intellect. You have to respect it; that’s the mystery of being with other people, that you are not with minds, your are with everything—with their sorrows and joys.

I was forced to think very hard about what it meant to be me, what it means to be a person who is only a brain. Pascal's 'thinking reed' really does capture it, because I'm just a bunch of dead muscles thinking.

Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut-wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask … It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.

When I was a child the mailman came once a day. Now the mail arrives every moment. I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.

So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.

The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.

consciousness is the “I am-ness” of life. We can only say, “I am,” because of consciousness. And without consciousness, we wouldn’t exist.

He was vulnerable to all the sorts of contradictions that every human can be subject to.

The stroke cut out a lot of my external trips: my sports car and golf and my cello. This [ points to hand ] is just not much use with a cello, and I was—forced inside, and finding myself living in my inside. And that has made me be part of my soul. And that's perceiving my incarnation from here [ points to heart ], rather than from here [ points to head ]. And since this is words, I start from here, go over there.

How people need the possibility of sharing, of not being alone. It’s bad to be poor, but it’s difficult to be alone.

But there's a big difference between being ungrateful and being a human being going through things. That took me a while to accept. Once you do, I think it's a lot more comforting to know that it's absolutely okay to feel whatever it is you're feeling, no matter how positive your life seems.

we’re just bags of water with the capacity to reason and spiritual callings.

I think part of the meaning of life is actually the search for the meaning of life. That may sound glib, but I truly believe it. Curiosity and looking for the meaning—even if we never find it—is the meaning.

you have no idea where your power, if you have any power, comes from and then, when it vanishes, you have no idea why it’s vanished.