There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

My life is mine to remember.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

My son complains about headaches. I tell him all the time, when you get out of bed, it’s feet first!

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

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

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest – ask him. If he says, ‚Yes,‘ you know he is a crook.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.

My life is not unlike Truman’s. I can’t go anywhere.

Every wall is a door.

To be awake is to be alive.

Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

There’s something about death that is comforting. The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Whenever I say I made a record in the garage, people just assume that I have, like, a Lear jet parked in there or something. But really there’s old luggage, a couple of bikes. It’s big enough to put one minivan in. That’s it. No dartboard. I’m so not macho.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on on the outside!

Jesters do often prove prophets.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

I’m half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I’d be in a hell of a mess!

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

There’s one advantage in having been around as long as I have. Everybody in the Senate knows me, and – I’m going to say something presumptuous, to repeat myself – I think most respect me.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

In football, it’s the job of the player to play, the coach to coach, the official to officiate. Each guy is charged with upholding his end, nothing more. In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go – that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

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