Nor is it certain how long you will live. . . . Your life is like the flame of a butter lamp in a hurricane, a bubble on water, or a drop of dew on a blade of grass.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Time is the only true purgatory.
If you think you’re boring your audience, go slower not faster.
The tragedy of old age is not that we are old, but that we are young.
What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death.
Rocks in the water don’t know the misery of rocks in the sun.
There are no separate realities, yours and his, for instance. There’s only one reality. If you’re able to deal with one end of reality, you’re dealing with the whole thing.
The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.
When you have a lot of things to do, get your nap out of the way first.
Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. You will find that you rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.
A man of fifty is responsible for his face.
Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.
Sure we’re all one, but — shh — don’t spread it around.
If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we always want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.
Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
I’m at that age now where just putting my cigar in its holder is a thrill.
The today that never comes on time.
In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
To kill time is to know God.
Perhaps a feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was erased so that God may be all of us. Who knows that but tonight we may see it in the labyrinth of dreams, and tomorrow not know that we saw it.
The word “now” is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.
