Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you. I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

All my life, whenever it comes time to make a decision, I make it and forget about it.

Freedom is relative.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

The future will be better tomorrow.

The more centuries that I am able to score, the happier I will be.

Everyone has the potential to become an encourager. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to be a genius. You don’t have to have it all together. All you have to do is care about people and initiate.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

It is easy to get everything you want, provided you first learn to do without the things you cannot get.

Life is too short not to celebrate nice moments!

How you played in yesterday’s game is all that counts.

Sometimes I think my husband is so amazing that I don’t know why he’s with me. I don’t know whether I’m good enough. But if I make him happy, then I’m everything I want to be.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

There’s no happier person than a truly thankful, content person.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

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

My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, ‚Oh God, I’ve got to do this today.‘

Hope is a waking dream.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Confidence is always a good thing to have going into the weekend. Especially where it’s quite difficult to put the lap together.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

It’s better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone – so far.

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

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.

You will never exaggerate when you speak good things of God. It is not possible to do so. Try, dear brethren, and boast in the Lord.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

If you want to have sustained joy, you have to not only make sure that you think right, but you also have to make decisions now that are going to guarantee some joy in the future.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.