Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don’ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

Real living is living for others.

There is none made so great, but he may both need the help and service, and stand in fear of the power and unkindness, even of the meanest of mortals.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Giving is better than receiving because giving starts the receiving process.

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

I always knew who I was, and I always ran from my true purpose… I know what my job is. And I always ran from it.

Don’t throw stones at your neighbors if your own windows are glass.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

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.

While there’s life, there’s hope.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

Our life is made by the death of others.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

I need one of those baby monitors from my subconscious to my consciousness so I can know what the hell I’m really thinking about.

And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy’s tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.

The way to know life is to love many things.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

Some people are jerks, and some people aren’t.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.

If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.

The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

The key to winning is choosing to do God’s will and loving others with all you’ve got.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.