If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

You can only make sense of the online world by going offline and by getting the wisdom and emotional clarity to know how to make the best use of the Internet.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

I suppose even when I was growing up, I noticed I was most happy when I was absorbed in something, lost in the moment and forgot the time, whether was conversation, movie, or a game I was playing. That was my definition of happiness. And I was least happy when I was all over the place, distracted and restless.

A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.

I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling. But there's something about it that you can't turn away from.

The less you struggle with a problem, the more it's likely to solve itself. The less time you spend frantically running around, the more productive you are likely to be.

You need to rebel to see the other options and to get a much richer, fuller sense of the world. And it's only once you've worked through that and seen through that that you can come back and accept who you are. You have to try all the other options.

A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure.

Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love because suddenly, all your senses are at the setting marked 'on.' Suddenly, you're alert to the secret patterns of the world.

Something in us is telling us we're moving too fast, at a pace dictated by machines rather than by anything human, and that unless we take conscious measures, we'll permanently be out of breath.

There are literally Internet rescue camps in China and Korea to deal with children that are addicted. Internet disorder is maybe going to count as a psychiatric disorder in a couple of years.

In the past, I've visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn't ordinarily explore.

It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that's necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.

Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

I think it's in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you.

I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.

People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.

When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents.

I think at this point I only write books about questions I really want to figure out. They're indulgences, essentially. I think, 'What would I like to spend five years really thinking about? What could I gain from thinking about for five years?'

More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

It's an old principle, as old as the Buddha or Marcus Aurelius: We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive.