Quotes on Life

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

I thought, I'm only going to be on this planet once, and only for a short time. What can I do with my life that will lead to permanent benefits?

Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a number, say salary or consumer power.

When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the show fiber has passed into your body.

I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.

We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives - things we've learnt since childhood that we don't even consciously realise are going on.

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.

As a child growing up in refugee camps, life taught me that many things were impossible. My older sister, Claire, taught me otherwise when her strength and resilience made the impossible possible in the way she worked, behaved, and took control of our lives.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man, and he was my brother.

Being equally convinced that aggression and rudeness are synonymous with having a "powerful personality."

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

To preserve an unclouded capacity for the enjoyment of life is an unusual moral and psychological achievement. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the prerogative of mindlessness, but the exact opposite: It is the reward of self-esteem.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

People would be amazed by the ordinary life William and I live. I do my own shopping. Sometimes, when I come away from the meat counter in my local supermarket, I worry someone will snap me with their phone. But I am determined to have a relatively normal life, and if I am lucky enough to have children, they can have one, too.

My mother's death brought me to my knees. She was my hero, my role model, my very best friend. I spoke to her every single day of my life. I really tried hard when I grew up to make her proud of me.

Work has never really been work for me. It's been a natural extension of my life.