Life’s short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there is no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.

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.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

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.

My comedy is different every time I do it. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

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

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.

Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

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

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

It is not like I have gone crazy, I just don’t want to take any chances. You never know what could happen.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

One secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

Forever is composed of nows.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

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

I have such incredible experiences in my life.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don’t know the probability that a planet develops life.

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

I’m not a fortune-teller.

I’m very, very serious – I’m serious enough not to take myself too seriously. That means I can be completely wedded to the moment. But when I leave that moment, I want to be completely wedded to the next moment.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

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

The willingness and ability to live fully in the now eludes many people. While eating your appetizer, don’t be concerned with dessert.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

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

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‚I’m with you kid. Let’s go.‘

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

Nowadays, manners are easy and life is hard.

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.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.