The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

The moment was all we truly had: a succession of moments, a triumphal march of them, to create a life beyond compare.

Play hard. Play, play, play like your life depends on it. Because it does.

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

You know, you lose a lot of social skills if you’re a writer. You spend too long alone. And it’s forced me to address that.

I have a very busy personality.

Why is the hearse with scutcheons blazon'd round, And with the nodding plume of ostrich crown'd? No; the dead know it not, nor profit gain; It only serves to prove the living vain.

If worse comes to worst, I say clearly - a soldier must follow military orders.

There were moments when I really just thought, I don't need anything and I don't need anyone. I just want to go away and disappear.