On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

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

Being happy is a matter of personal taste.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

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.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

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.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

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

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

All you need to do to be my friend is like me.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

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

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

It’s absolutely normal that different human beings want to go different ways.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death… I think… peace and tranquillity will return again.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

Children are all foreigners.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

You must not fear death, my lads; defy him, and you drive him into the enemy’s ranks.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

I believe in a passion for inclusion.

I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

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.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

We all gonna die eventually from something or other, but don’t be a wimp. Put up a good fight.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.