Quotes on Life

Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.

What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.

But always and sometimes questioning the old modes_x000D_ _x000D_ And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,_x000D_ _x000D_ Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual_x000D_ _x000D_ Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now,_x000D_ _x000D_ Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.

Remember me and smile, for it's better to forget than to remember me and cry.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.

I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns.

To live means to experience-through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested.

As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.

Thou wouldst be loved? - then let thy heart_x000D_ _x000D_ From its present pathway part not!_x000D_ _x000D_ Being everything which now thou art,_x000D_ _x000D_ Be nothing which thou art not._x000D_ _x000D_ So with the world thy gentle ways,_x000D_ _x000D_ Thy grace, thy more than beauty,_x000D_ _x000D_ Shall be an endless theme of praise,_x000D_ _x000D_ And love - a simple duty.

A globalized world is by now a familiar fact of life. Building walls or moats may sound appealing, but the future belongs to those who tend to their people and then boldly engage the rest of the world, near and far.

We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

I would counsel people to go to college, because it's one of the best times in your life in terms of who you meet and develop a broad set of intellectual skills.

If you trained jiu-jitsu his whole life, why would you trade punches on fight night against a striker?

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

Cancer didn't change me at all. I know lots of people talk about the life revelation. I didn't have that.

The Kingdom of God is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.

I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.

Every achiever that I have ever met says, 'My life turned around when I began to believe in me'.