If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

I don’t look at my old work. I mean, they made nice books; the books were made without me, the one from last year and the one from this year. I – personally, I’m not interested in my own past. I’m only interested in today – perhaps tomorrow.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

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

My wife has about everything I can think of.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

Many people in this world are still so identified with every thought that arises in their head. There is not the slightest space of awareness there.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.

First and foremost comes my family and my life with Brad. We have so much joy in raising our children and teaching them about the world that nothing really compares to that.

I’m not a New Age person, but I do believe in meditation, and for that reason I’ve always liked the Buddhist religion. When I’ve been to Japan, I’ve been to Buddhist temples and meditated, and I found that rewarding.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

How sweet it is to learn the Savior’s love when nobody else loves us! When friends flee, what a blessed thing it is to see that the Savior does not forsake us but still keeps us and holds us fast and clings to us and will not let us go!

Let my skin and sinews and bones dry up, together with all the flesh and blood of my body! I welcome it! But I will not move from this spot until I have attained the supreme and final wisdom.

I’ve been very fortunate.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

Tomorrow is nothing, today is too late; the good lived yesterday.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.

You have to grab moments when they happen. I like to improvise and ad lib.

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‚mother wit‘ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance.

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve – not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country – those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy – the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

God has given us two hands, one to receive with and the other to give with.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules.

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

You have to stay fresh and blank in your mind when you go out to bat. You complicate things, and you’re gone.

What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy’s tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

A Scout smiles and whistles under all circumstances.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

It feels good to have your work respected again.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

However great may be the work for which we are responsible, we will always do well if we pause to spend time in sacred praise.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.