Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future!

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.

The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you’re wrinkled.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

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

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

To be renewed is everything. What more could one ask for than to have one’s youth back again?

The loss of life will be irreplaceable.

I’ve had some ‚riotous excursions of the human spirit‘ alongside the young Sailors and Marines, and it’s time to leave the stage to the young leaders who got their rank the old-fashioned way – they earned their stripes in combat.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.

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

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It’s either growing or it’s dying. No matter if it’s a tree or a human being.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

As I approached my 95th birthday, I was burdened to write a book that addressed the epidemic of ‚easy believism.‘ There is a mindset today that if people believe in God and do good works, they are going to Heaven.

Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.

To like an individual because he’s black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn’t white.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

I’m never going to be fast, and nobody will ever mistake me for being fast.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

I just have an enthusiasm for life.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

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.

As I got older, I guess I became more mellow and more forgiving and more loving.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Sometimes, you might meet somebody that you love that’s turning into a ‚they.‘ My key is invite them to Miami and take them to the ocean and let them jump off the boat in the ocean, on the sand bar, and cleanse off and pray and then go take a shower, and hopefully the ‚they‘ is out of you.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‚Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.‘

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.