Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th‘ observer’s sake.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

God has already done everything He’s going to do. The ball is now in your court. If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

There is no unique picture of reality.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

Life’s a bit like mountaineering – never look down.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

I see the world in black and white, and I don’t like compromising.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

Players today moan about the number of games, but when you’re young, you can’t play enough.