All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.
A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us.
In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that.
It felt as if things were literally slipping through my fingers. Things were just streaming away from me. I lost my sense of humor. I'm still looking for that.
When you stop and look at so much of the kind of activism that has been triggered, the Tea Party and the like, as a result of Obama's efforts - TARP, the stimulus package, and now the health care reform - there is a lot of sense this government is changing.
Everybody says that it takes a loss to lose and I think it did take a loss for us to lose in a sense. But overall, when we win games here at Duke, and we don't play well, we might as well have lost the game.
You don't have any kind of sense of being foolish when you are acting. When you're younger you don't want to look a fool, so you don't do things that might make you vulnerable.
I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.
