Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn’t investigated. They might find that I don’t really exist – that I’m just a hologram.

The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need – not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment.

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.

I don’t see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

We are wiser than we know.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

The older you get, the better you get.

You’re beautiful, like a May fly.

I don’t write so much now. I’m getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age.

First and foremost comes my family and my life with Brad. We have so much joy in raising our children and teaching them about the world that nothing really compares to that.

One day it will be over, and I don’t care.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

As I approached my 95th birthday, I was burdened to write a book that addressed the epidemic of ‚easy believism.‘ There is a mindset today that if people believe in God and do good works, they are going to Heaven.

Africa is probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.

I draw pleasure in governance, in doing new things and bringing people together. That pleasure is all I need from life.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

It is not well to make great changes in old age.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.