“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.”

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on the forehead. Pay attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him.”

“Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through the chemists’ bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudomarble. For in imagination I had gone into a shop; it was laid with black and white paving; it was hung, astonishingly beautifully, with coloured ribbons.”

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

“

Science works in data and statistics, but medicine is made up of stories, says Elizabeth Rider, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Narratives form the backbone of medicine — they’re the way people make sense of the evidence.

Women whose breast cancers were diagnosed with a mammogram will never be persuaded by the new mammography guidelines, Breast Cancer Action’s Brenner says. “They all say, ‘If it weren’t for that mammogram, I’d be dead right now,’” she says, “even though we know from the data that this wasn’t the case for most of them.”

“Victims of overdiagnosis don’t say, ‘Look what the system did to me.’ They say, ‘Thank God the doctor saved me,’” says Thomas B. Newman, a physician and narrative medicine expert at the University of California, San Francisco. “Nobody can say I had an unnecessary mastectomy, and nobody would want to; it doesn’t make a good story.”

Belief is a very difficult thing to overturn, especially when the belief is held by people with a vested interest in the old message. Sometimes these investments are monetary (back doctors make more money on procedures than on conservative treatment), but they can also be altruistic — breast cancer advocacy groups want to offer women something to protect themselves from a scary disease.

When the evidence presents a messy, unsatisfying picture, people are likely to take refuge in a more comforting story, even in the face of evidence that it’s wrong. It comes down to something the satirist Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness,” a term he coined in a 2005 episode of his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report. “Truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are,” Colbert said. “It is the truth that is felt deep down, in the gut.” The backlash against the new mammography guidelines stemmed in part from the truthiness of the message that mammography could prevent breast cancer. No matter that it wasn’t true, it was what people wanted to believe.

”

“

As I see it, there are three principal requirements for the job. The first is experience in management, business, and organization: maybe someone who’s worked as a management consultant, an entrepreneur, and an executive in both the public and private sectors. The second is the ability and capacity to commit: someone who isn’t likely to have any pressing obligations for the next several years, and who has enough cash that he or she doesn’t need a large private-sector salary. Third is relevant experience in implementing a large-scale health-care reform program, ideally one that involved using an individual mandate and the private insurance system to attain near-universal health insurance.

In other words, this sounds like a job for Mitt Romney.

”

“Is the bridge gappable (as Mr. Cantor might say)? Yes, if the Republicans are interested, but only because neither side has really grappled with the cost issue. When Aunt Minnie back in the district has a hip replacement (her second) and gets a bill for $90,000, the challenge is not to find someone other than Aunt Minnie to pay. The challenge is to deliver hip replacements for less than $90,000, or tell Aunt Minnie she can’t have one.”

“But iTunes isn’t selling access. It’s selling content, song by song. It changed the game by letting us buy individual recordings instead of albums, which dovetailed beautifully with the rise of playlists, the modern cousin of the mix tape.”

“But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”

“One study of America’s Fortune 500 companies found that the one quarter with the most female executives had a return on equity 35% higher than the quarter with the fewest female executives. On the Japanese stock exchange, the companies with the highest proportion of female employees performed nearly 50% better than those with the lowest. In either case, the most likely reason isn’t that female executives are geniuses. Rather, it is that companies that are innovative enough to promote women are also ahead of the curve in reacting to business opportunities. That is the essence of a sustainable economic model.”

“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occured to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occured to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squawling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, theres only one direction. And time is its only measure.”

“The greatest cleverness lies in not doing certain things, and the greatest wisdom lies in not pondering certain things. With respect to Heaven, focus only on those manifest phenomena to which you can align yourself. With respect to earth, focus only on those manifest places which are suitable for growing.”

“

In the philosopher’s picture, the good life is won through direct assault. Heroes use reason to separate virtue from vice. Then they use willpower to conquer weakness, fear, selfishness and the dark passions lurking inside. Once they achieve virtue they do virtuous things.

In the psychologist’s version, the good life is won indirectly. People have only vague intuitions about the instincts and impulses that have been implanted in them by evolution, culture and upbringing. There is no easy way to command all the wild things jostling inside.

But it is possible to achieve momentary harmony through creative work. Max has all his Wild Things at peace when he is immersed in building a fort or when he is giving another his complete attention. This isn’t the good life through heroic self-analysis but through mundane, self-forgetting effort, and through everyday routines.

Appiah believes these two views of conduct are in conversation, not conflict. But it does seem we’re in one of those periods when words like character fall into dispute and change their meaning.

”

“Americans are like singers — we just a little bit, kind of like to be loved. The British want to be admired; the Russians, feared; the French, envied. (The Irish, we just want to be listened to.) But the idea of America, from the very start, was supposed to be contagious enough to sweep up and enthrall the world.”