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

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

Every time I think that I’m getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Life in abundance comes only through great love.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Money can’t buy life.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me.

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

God just has a way of working things out the way he wants to and you have no say in that.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

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

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

You can’t do something forever.

Racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, or hatred of anyone with different beliefs has no place in the human mind or heart.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Old age may have its limitations and challenges, but in spite of them, our latter years can be some of the most rewarding and fulfilling of our lives.

Prime time for men is, say, 35 to 45. Then they level off and fall off.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.

My life is my argument.

I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

When I was young, I could not imagine being old. My mother said, and the doctor confirmed, that I had an unusual amount of energy; and it followed me into young adulthood.

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death’s the other.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.