Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn’t trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

The bottom line on the Hyde Amendment is that it is directly, in effect, targeting poor women and women who don’t have money.

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Actor’s life is very long.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

I have a feeling that I make a very good friend, and I’m a good mother, and a good sister, and a good citizen. I am involved in life itself – all of it. And I have a lot of energy and a lot of nerve.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

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.

I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go – that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

I decided, very early on, just to accept life unconditionally; I never expected it to do anything special for me, yet I seemed to accomplish far more than I had ever hoped. Most of the time it just happened to me without my ever seeking it.

My life is real.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

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.

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

All the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

Life is anything but predictable.

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.

To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.

I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

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.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

While there’s life, there’s hope.

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It’s either growing or it’s dying. No matter if it’s a tree or a human being.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

Poverty wants some, luxury many, and avarice all things.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren’t random.

The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

I have such incredible experiences in my life.