Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.

I’ve learned that men and women who are living wholehearted lives really allow themselves to soften into joy and happiness. They allow themselves to experience it.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

I married my best friend that happens to be a girl.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.

For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive – that you can touch the miracle of being alive – then that is a kind of enlightenment.

I believe that the greatest gift you can give your family and the world is a healthy you.

Love can do much, but duty more.

A useless life is an early death.

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

Because of a great love, one is courageous.

He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

I like actors very much, but to marry one would be like marrying your brother. You look too much alike in the mirror.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life.

Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

Most people would rather give than get affection.

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

I only want my work to make people happy.

Fame may go by and – so long, I’ve had you.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.

A friend is nothing but a known enemy.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

This is not a bad life.

Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I’ve met.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.