Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

Life is a dead-end street.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

Anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

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.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.

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

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

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.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

I like the idea of putting your Christmas wish list up and letting people share it.

I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief… All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

I’m constantly thinking.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

Christmas means a great deal to me. I was reared in a family that celebrated Christmas to some extent, but I married into a family that celebrated Christmas in a big way. And my wife always made a big thing of Christmas for the children. We have five children, and we had a terrific time at Christmas.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

Christmas is the perfect time to celebrate the love of God and family and to create memories that will last forever. Jesus is God’s perfect, indescribable gift. The amazing thing is that not only are we able to receive this gift, but we are able to share it with others on Christmas and every other day of the year.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

My one big regret is that I didn’t play on for ten more years.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

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

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.