Golf without bunkers and hazards would be tame and monotonous. So would life.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

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

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.

What I enjoy most is doing something I’ve never done before.

A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage. It’s my favorite part of the business, live concerts.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

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.

To become ‚unique,‘ the challenge is to fight the hardest battle which anyone can imagine until you reach your destination.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won’t let go.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

I’ve been everywhere in the world, seen everything, had everything a man can have.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

I’m not feeling very well – I need a doctor immediately. Ring the nearest golf course.

Life is precious.

Respect is one of life’s greatest treasures. I mean, what does it all add up to if you don’t have that?

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

If you’re embarking around the world in a hot-air balloon, don’t forget the toilet paper.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

There is no way I would ask others to go on a Virgin Galactic flight if I didn’t feel it was safe enough for myself.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

How you respond to the challenge in the second half will determine what you become after the game, whether you are a winner or a loser.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Life is short, the art long.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.