And in real life endings aren’t always neat, whether they’re happy endings, or whether they’re sad endings.

God has his plans and his reasons. Sometimes we are supposed to go through things so that we learn lessons.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

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

I think I have to trust that you end up with the person you’re supposed to end up with, and that everything in between is there to teach you stuff.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having Fun and being Smart.

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

Love is the one wild card.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Don’t get older just to get wiser. If you get older, you will be wiser, I believe that – if you dare. But get older because it’s fun!

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.

Lost time is never found again.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Sports are such a great teacher. I think of everything they’ve taught me: camaraderie, humility, how to resolve differences.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!

You can’t do something forever.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

Whatever fortune has raised to a height, she has raised only to cast it down.

We are like boxers, one never knows how much longer one has.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

Fear is not a lasting teacher of duty.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.

We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

The reward of suffering is experience.

Money can’t buy life.

The last suit that you wear, you don’t need any pockets.

I still learn, but I think it’s the best thing in life to have a kid.

We should not moor a ship with one anchor, or our life with one hope.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

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.

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

We cannot learn men from books.

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.