It was something I never expected to – I never expected the book would sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

God can cause opportunity to find you. He has unexpected blessings where you suddenly meet the right person, or suddenly your health improves, or suddenly you’re able to pay off your house. That’s God shifting things in your favor.

In 1995, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I had to practice what I preached. I had always said to ‚believe in God‘ and ‚don’t give up‘ to little kids who had been diagnosed with cancer. I then thought if I can’t call on that same God and same strength that I told people about, I would be a liar and a phony.

In every parting there is an image of death.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

They say miracles are past.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favour of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

I’ve read the last page of the Bible. It’s all going to turn out all right.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair, there is no hope.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Most of us have hoped and prayed for something to happen a certain way, but it didn’t. And when this happened, we had a choice to make: to react with offense toward God or to trust Him anyway.

The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

What I’m asking for is hard. It’s easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn’t possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don’t matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Marriage is the death of hope.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

I’m hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.

Our Revolution emerged where it was least expected by the empire, in a hemisphere where it was used to acting like an all-powerful master.

We should not moor a ship with one anchor, or our life with one hope.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

A leader is a dealer in hope.

When you think of the exponential speed and scale of expansion of social media or a service, you have to believe that it is equally possible to rapidly transform the lives of those who have long stood on the margins of hope.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait. The grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.

He would make a lovely corpse.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror – not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

I hope my own children never have to fight a war.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could look forward to a whole world in which no child will be left behind?

Over the years, I had nurtured the hope to be able to fly; to handle a machine as it rose higher and higher in the stratosphere was my dearest dream.