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

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

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

The notion that we have even one single veteran living on the streets should be just considered a travesty to all of us.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

I wouldn’t say that anyone in fashion is on my side. I don’t think there’s anyone on my side.

Man, wear your seat belts. That’s all I can tell everybody. You never know.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Most people have the opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Death means change our clothes. Clothes become old, then time to come change. So this body become old, and then time come, take young body.

I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

For me, money is not my definition of success. Inspiring people is a definition of success.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

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.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

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

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Sin is geographical.

I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realise is that you’re not alone.

A lot of people are realizing they had the wool pulled over their eyes by Obama.

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.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‚solve the climate crisis.‘ But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.