Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

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?

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

I’m not the same man I used to be, I’m not out hell-raising, stuff like that. I am a changed man.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

I doubt that the Lord cares much which honorable vocation you choose. But He does care if you love one another and serve one another.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

My life is mine to remember.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

There is nothing permanent except change.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

Art is the proper task of life.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

We’re running the company to serve more people.

Dissents speak to a future age.

I don’t want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I’m completely confused. I’m like, ‚Didn’t you make that movie already?‘ I’ve been very fortunate, and I’m well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

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

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

I always knew who I was, and I always ran from my true purpose… I know what my job is. And I always ran from it.

Missionaries serve to make life better for God’s children.

The exercise of benevolence is joy to loving hearts: the more pain it costs, the more joy it is. Kind actions make us happy, and in such joy we find communion with the great heart of Jesus.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows – pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music… That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.