Quotes on Life

Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

At 11 years old, I made a very definitive decision, and my decision was that I wanted to be happy. Above and beyond anything I ever did in my life, I wanted to be happy.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that's the height of intelligence.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life.

One of the huge imbalances in life is the disparity between your daily existence, with its routines and habits, and the dream you have within yourself of some extraordinarily satisfying way of living.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

Perhaps no promise in life is more reassuring than that promise of divine assistance and spiritual guidance in times of need. It is a gift freely given from heaven, a gift that we need from our earliest youth through the very latest days of our lives.

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth and the soul requires inward restfulness to attain its full height.

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

Every coach has his own style of play, but when you spend your whole life as a Cowboy, you have to be influenced by what we did.

If you aren't good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself.

That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

Don't give in to your fears. If you do, you won't be able to talk to your heart.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn't believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.