Chris Dixon:

People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don't waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.

Tim Kreider:

I'm not old but I'm not young anymore, either, and if you're a procrastinator and a ditherer like me you can manage to sustain until well into midlife the delusion that you might yet get around to doing all the things you meant to do; making a movie, getting married, living in Paris. But at some point you start to suspect that you might not end up doing that stuff after all, and have to consider the possibility that the life you have right now might pretty much be it.

God, how I long to go out West again someday -- to drive some blue highway in Nevada or Utah until there's absolutely nothing around me, then stop the car, in the middle of the road, maybe, and get out and just stand there, where I can see the horizon in every direction, and smell the air and feel the sun and listen to the silence of the desert. I have this idea that if I could do this, time might hold still for a second, and I would know, for just a moment, what it feels like to be here.

Penelope Trunk:

I felt, for a moment, that I have the life I've always wanted.

Jerry Seinfeld:

You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it. I used to keep pictures of the Hubble on the wall of the writing room at Seinfeld. It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important.

People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don't find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.