You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

I’m super self-critical, which I think is good, because then I get exactly what I want. I’m critical of other people, too – I try not to be, though.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

No matter how prepared you think you are for the death of a loved one, it still comes as a shock, and it still hurts very deeply.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

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

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

What one fool can understand, another can.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

What you are comes to you.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

Without football, my life is worth nothing.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

If he have faith, the believer cannot be restrained. He betrays himself. He breaks out. He confesses and teaches this gospel to the people at the risk of life itself.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

Solitude is independence.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

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

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry. When we are born we cry, that we are come to this great state of fools.

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.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.