Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

I just have an enthusiasm for life.

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.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

I draw pleasure in governance, in doing new things and bringing people together. That pleasure is all I need from life.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

Fresh activity is the only means of overcoming adversity.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

People respond when you tell them there is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow’s viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I’m an Irish man.

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

This has been my life for many years; one role feeds the other.

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.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

A true man hates no one.

It’s life isn’t it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

No one but a fool is always right.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

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

God and I have a great relationship, but we both see other people.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.