The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

Every one goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

I think in the ’70s that there was a general feeling of chaos, a feeling that the idea of the ’60s as ‚ideal‘ was a misnomer. Nothing seemed ideal anymore. Everything seemed in-between.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

Life is wasted on the living.

I still close my eyes and go home – I can always draw from that.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

When we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow, remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

Dissents speak to a future age.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

I’ve been pleased to work with so many wonderful stars through the years. This has been an amazing journey. I hope it continues.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

I haven’t written my own epitaph, and I’m not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

It’s the journey of self, I guess. You start with this kind of loner, outside guy, which a lot of people can relate to, and he goes out into the world.

There is so much that people take for granted.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.