The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
That some good can be derived from every event is a better proposition than that everything happens for the best, which it assuredly does not.
Nothing bad’s going to happen to us. If we get fired, it’s not failure; it’s a midlife vocational reassessment.
Oh, my friend, it’s not what they take away from you that counts. It’s what you do with what you have left.
Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.
I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.
I bear a little more than I can bear.
Perhaps this is why it is man alone who laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
Joy, happiness . . . we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections, . . . to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness, to some extent, isolates.
Sorrow has its reward. It never leaves us where it found us.
I read about a man who’d been sentenced to die, saying or thinking, the hour before his death, that even if he had to live somewhere high up on a rock . . . with all around precipices, an ocean, an endless murk, endless solitude and endless storms — and had to stand there, on those two feet of space, all his life, for a thousand years, eternity — that it would be better to live like that than to die so very soon! If only he could live, live, and live! Never mind what that life was like! As long as he could live!
If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Some of the world’s greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.
