Whatever fortune has raised to a height, she has raised only to cast it down.

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

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

Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.

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.

Love is a better teacher than duty.

If you are first you are first. If you are second you are nothing.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me.

I never had a speech from my father ‚this is what you must do or shouldn’t do‘ but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn’t perfect.

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.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

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

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

Experience is the teacher of all things.

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

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.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

There’s always a bittersweet kind of thing, but I feel like everything had to work out the way it is. Everything that had to happen, happened.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

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

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world – not even our troubles.

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!

We cannot learn men from books.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

I still learn, but I think it’s the best thing in life to have a kid.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

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

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

Man is supposed to be the maker of his destiny. It is only partly true. He can make his destiny, only in so far as he is allowed by the Great Power.

We are like boxers, one never knows how much longer one has.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

If a man could have half of his wishes, he would double his troubles.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

I’ve had the good fortune and blessing to run for the offices for which I really wanted to do the work.

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

To hold a man down, you have to stay down with him.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

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.

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.