I don't think fear can be abolished.

Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.

What's missing from the world is a sense of direction.

The more education you do, the less you are capable of doing.

The French have made conversation their claim to civilisation.

Only when people learn to converse will they begin to be equal.

A dream is what makes people love life even when it is painful.

We cannot change public life until we have changed private life.

Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.

Change the way you think, and you are halfway to changing the world.

Change the way you think, and you are already halfway to changing the world.

The great thing about marriage is that it creates trust, the most precious of things.

The institution of marriage, if you look at it over many centuries, has come and gone.

Gastronomy has done more to bring together people of the world than any guns ever could.

I'm amazed at the number of young women who tell me they can't find men to talk to them.

All invention and progress comes from finding a link between two ideas that have never met.

However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.

We should strive to be employed in such a way that we don't realize that what we're doing is work.

When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?

You cannot measure the minute nuance that makes the difference between being happy and unhappy at work.

The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.

One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.

Forks and spoons have probably done more to reconcile people who cannot agree than guns and bombs ever did

The tendency of experts is to fiddle around with their expertise rather than trying to find new solutions.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

The violent have been victorious for most of history because they kindled the fear with which everyone is born.

Never before have humans been so ambitious, have they thought that they could be much more than their parents were.

You have to accept that traditions exist, that people don't change their minds very quickly, that people are scared.

In every life there is an element of victory over fear, which needs to be searched for, though it may be a false victory.

I think the hero in our generation is not the individual but the pair, two people who together add up to more than they are apart.

France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they're valued.

Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part. Scholars never agree about anything.

Each person is an enigma. You're a puzzle not only to yourself but also to everyone else, and the great mystery of our time is how we penetrate this puzzle.

We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.

People in this world of superficial communication find themselves isolated and lonely and have difficult in talking about personal things that really matter to them.

Two individuals, conversing honestly, can be inspired by the feeling that they are engaged in a joint enterprise, aiming at inventing an art which has not been tried before.

The English reputation for humour is a way by which people avoid revealing themselves and have superficial relationships, so that you can engage in banter without making yourself vulnerable.

To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they can control it, wish to influence its direction.

Brilliant lecturers shouldn't be wasted in lecture rooms: they should appear onTV. We need black market universities, in which people just help each other, and which don't leave out the poor.

To idolise a person means you don't get to know them, and the idea that you can become one is a myth, and it also means that you don't need to talk to one another because you're the same person.

Conversation creates a new kind of network within organizations. Current networks are used for competitive advantage, but conversation is focused on encouraging people to realize their potential.

We are already seeing the creation of a new kind of network based on friendships: Startups, which are often founded by friends, are the beginning of something that could reshape social relations.

The world is... often terrifying, disgusting and tragic, but it is also beautiful. I should like to know how exactly each person would make it a tiny bit less disgusting and a tiny bit more beautiful.

It's easy to say, 'I'm anti-capitalist,' or, 'I'm anti-Western decadence,' without having to be challenged about what that actually means, or how you might go about reshaping society to make it better.

It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, to attempt to increase, by even a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world.

Everything I am going to say to you is the child of a conversation. [...] That is the aspect of conversation that particularly excites me: how conversation changes the way you see the world, and even changes the world.

I'm constantly astounded by the way people talk so openly to someone they don't know. They clarify in their own minds what is important to them, discover another person has similar problems, and create trust and even a friendship.

Families have become models for public life, constructing friendships between individuals of different temperaments, ambitions and ages, even if they are often unsuccessful. People now want, above all, appreciation of their uniqueness.

We should abolish 'work.' By that I mean abolishing the distinction between work and leisure, one of the greatest mistakes of the last century, one that enables employers to keep workers in lousy jobs by granting them some leisure time.

Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of our existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable.

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