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For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing.

There is no fruit which is not bitter before it is ripe.

run around with fire extinguishers in times of flood.

Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can't control whether you're a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it's better to be hard or soft. If you can find a more favorable environment, you can transform the situation from one where the odds are against you to one where they are in your favor.

Christopher Parker put it so well when he stated that procrastination is like a credit card: it's a lot of fun until you get the bill.

Learning is deeper and more durable when it's effortful. Learning that's easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.

OUR LIFE IS the creation of our minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor. We see new things in terms of things we already understand: Life is a journey, an argument is a war, the mind is a rider on an elephant. With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind.

like a traditional toolbox has a hammer when you need to pound a nail but a wrench for when you need to turn a bolt,

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

Through the EU and NATO Germany is anchored in Western Europe, but in stormy weather anchors can slip, and Berlin is geographically situated to shift the focus of its attention east if required and forge much closer ties with Moscow.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.

I think this idea that you learn the most from failures is wrong. It's a good thing to say so that people feel better, but whenever you want to learn how to do something well, you start by studying people who are really good. You don't study all the failed sprinters to learn how to run fast; you study the person who's really fast. There are a lot of reasons things can go wrong, but your job is to make things work.

building a factory in an earthquake zone: just one bit of bad luck and the expensive investment might be trashed.

the trial-and-error method of putting a jigsaw puzzle together. The more parts you put together, the easier it is to find places for the remaining parts, if only because there are fewer of them.

It didn't help that everyone I knew in Moscow had left. I'd had a Thursday-night poker game with expats and English-speaking Russians, and at its height in mid-1997 thirteen people regularly attended. But by January 2000 I was the only one left. It was like being the last passenger at an airport baggage carousel. Everyone else had got their luggage and gone home, but I was standing there all by myself, watching the creaking metal track go round and round, waiting for my bag - knowing it was lost and would never show up.

avoiding the swing from pain to boredom and back that would carry us passively through life like a plastic bag in the wind.