Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.

I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I’ve had and also the people I’ve had around me. I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we’re even alive at all.

If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.

I’m living a dream I never want to wake up from.

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

One time, this guy was bothering my mother, and me and my brothers had a stern talking with the guy and a little bit of physicality with him. So he disappeared. But I’m not a magician.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping .

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.

I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

In Buddhist culture, offering food to the monk symbolizes the action of goodness, and if you have no opportunity to support the practice of spirituality, then you are somehow left in the realm of darkness.

I actually feel like women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain when we consider all of the people who are really struggling and don’t have the means or support. Many people are single, raising children. That’s hard.

The best thing about being a dad? Well, I think it’s just the thing that every man wants – to have a son and heir.

Number of people have said to me, after hearing your thinking, their mind becomes much more happier.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

If you have a family mission statement that clarifies what your purpose is, then you use that as the criterion by which you make the decisions.

The soul is healed by being with children.

If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.

My father wasn’t perfect. He had a temper. I took some of that. He would snap, but the older he got, he started calming down. He learned about life, but the thing that he taught my whole family was that family was the most important thing and, no matter what, if a family member needs you, you go and help them out; you get there.

A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, providing there are not too many.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

The chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it – and sometimes three.

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

You can’t trust very many people.

He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

I used to live with my grandmother. I used to wonder why the other kids in school went home with their mothers and fathers. I wanted to be the guy that got married. I wanted to be the guy with the children and the white picket fence. I never had that.

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.

A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.

I don’t like being alone.

I think a father is important for everyone. If you don’t have, then maybe not so much. In the world today, it’s possible that you grow up with only one parent in the family.

I’ve had moments when I’ve thought about somebody, picked up the phone to call them and they are on the line already, and I think that maybe there’s some vibration, some connection.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

My mom’s one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

You can’t buy love, but you can pay heavily for it.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

Life well spent is long.

The secret to a long marriage is to stay gone.