Mortality is very different when you’re 20 to when you’re 50.

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

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

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

It is natural to die as to be born.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

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.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

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

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

History is more or less bunk.

I don’t know if I could do this with the same energy, and in the same way – all the costume changes and glitter and hair and makeup – all the time. When I’m in my 50s, I kind of think I’ll want to be in a garden.

We all know we have a finite period of time. I just feel if I’m going to be alive, I want to be challenged – to be as immortal as possible. The path to that isn’t an easy way, but it’s a rewarding way.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

I really love training and being in good shape, and it’s so much a part of my life now, so it never really feels like work to me.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

The first wealth is health.

This is not a bad life.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

Health consists with temperance alone.

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

For me, money is not my definition of success. Inspiring people is a definition of success.

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the world.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

Water is life, and clean water means health.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.