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

There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

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

I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.

Life is a dead-end street.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

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

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

In this bright future you can’t forget your past.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

I absolutely adore Christmas.

My experience is listen, see, feel – and then think about what you change.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.

That’s the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

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.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.

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

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

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

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

I have wondered about time all my life.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Christmas morning, I’m going to open presents with my kids. I’m going to take pictures of them opening the presents. Then I’m going to come to the Staples Center and get ready to work.

Shall I, that have destroyed my Preservers, return home?

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

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.

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.

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

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

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

There have been times that I’ve wept as I’ve gone from city to city and I’ve seen how far people have wandered from God.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.