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

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

We do not judge the people we love.

I’d love to date somebody cool, fun, funny.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Fun is good.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one of the things that women have is men.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

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.

I never woke up and thought, ‚I really want to live a bold life.‘

When people get married young, you don’t really understand the true definition of marriage.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Ultimately, who you choose to be in a relationship with and what you do in your bedroom is your business.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

I’ve often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.

Fear is exciting for me.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

I’ve known and continue to know every one of these major world leaders by their first names, and I have access to them.

Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness or misery.

I’m just a friendly person; that runs in my family.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

As I get older, I tend to put more into family than I used to.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

There is just no comparison between having a dinner date with a man and staying home playing canasta with the girls.

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.

My dear brothers and sisters, the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives.

I’d rather tell you how I really feel.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.