We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

I’ve been careful in love. I’ve been careless in love. And I’ve had adventures I wouldn’t trade for anything.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

My friends, there are no friends.

Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid and neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Remember that a gesture of friendship, no matter how small, is always appreciated.

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the style, the sharpness, the clarity, and the emotions to affect other people.

A man will speedily sit down and sympathize with a friend’s griefs, but if he sees him honored and esteemed, he is apt to regard him as a rival and does not so readily rejoice with him. This ought not to be; without effort, we ought to be happy in our brother’s happiness.

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Regarding marriage, it – somehow, it didn’t happen. One fellow in such a big family not getting married is not an issue.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.

Marriage is the most wonderful thing ever.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

I am in the fighting game. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t watch the news, I don’t care about politics, I don’t care about other sports. I don’t care about anything I don’t need to care about. This is my sport: it is my life. I study it; I think about it all the time. Nothing else matters.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

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

I’m working at trying to be a Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy – it’s serious business.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.

Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone… Bad food is fake food… food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

Friendship… is not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.

In the flush of love’s light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

Marriage destroyed my relationship with two wonderful men.

There is no such thing as a lovers‘ oath.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.

If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it’s to have any meaning in this world – and stop being its apologist.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.