Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

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.

The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

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

The exercise of benevolence is joy to loving hearts: the more pain it costs, the more joy it is. Kind actions make us happy, and in such joy we find communion with the great heart of Jesus.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.

In history people dressed much better than we do today.

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.

There is no way to happiness – happiness is the way.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

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

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

A good laugh is sunshine in the house.

There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern… No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

It could be if I fight in front of one person or one million people. It’s still the same emotions.

Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

This is not a bad life.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

I’m living a dream I never want to wake up from.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

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

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.