It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

Getting in and out of the car with the halo takes a bit of experience. I struggled initially, but after a few trial runs I was fine.

In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

The man who has no problems is out of the game.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Keep in mind that no matter how perfectly you get your life in order, you will never be rid of all your problems. Problems are a way of life, always have been, always will be. But how you elect to view those problems is all up to you.

I have always reckoned the dignity of the republic of first importance and preferable to life.

Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.

Life is wasted on the living.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

It’s God’s will for you to live in prosperity instead of poverty. It’s God’s will for you to pay your bills and not be in debt.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

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.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It’s commenting or observing or twisting life.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

I have rules for a lot of areas of my life. Love is not going to be one of them.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

Money’s important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don’t have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

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

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

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

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.

Our life is made by the death of others.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.