life lessons quotes

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

All my life I’ve been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

Don’t get older just to get wiser. If you get older, you will be wiser, I believe that – if you dare. But get older because it’s fun!

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

I think I have to trust that you end up with the person you’re supposed to end up with, and that everything in between is there to teach you stuff.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

Don’t let the incidents which take place in life bring you low. And certainly don’t whine. You can be brought low, that’s OK, but don’t be reduced by them. Just say, ‚That’s life.‘

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

We cannot learn men from books.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

The older I get, the better I understand that every day is a gift.

You don’t sign up for a divorce when you get married. It’s very painful. But it’s taught me a great deal about myself.

If it doesn’t work out there will never be any doubt that the pleasure was worth all the pain.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

God has his plans and his reasons. Sometimes we are supposed to go through things so that we learn lessons.

Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

As I grow up, the lessons I learn in love and relationships and how we treat each other are hopefully maturing – hopefully.

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

Life is about conduct and how we conduct ourselves. But two wrongs never make a right.

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.

When you are young you tend to do so many things that are not needed. When you get experience, you know what exactly what works for you and you tend to do things that you want.

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

So I’ve seen life as one long learning process. And if I see – you know, if I fly on somebody else’s airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn’t in – 21 years ago, then I’d think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I’d like to fly on.

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.

No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having Fun and being Smart.

The last suit that you wear, you don’t need any pockets.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

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.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

You can’t go backward in life.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

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.

Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

Personally, I like reading adventures which really have happened to people, because they show what kind of things might happen to oneself, and they teach one how to ‚Be Prepared‘ to meet them.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.