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.

Kalu Rinpoche

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Susan Ertz

Time is the only true purgatory.

Samuel Butler

If you think you’re boring your audience, go slower not faster.

Gustav Mahler

The tragedy of old age is not that we are old, but that we are young.

Oscar Wilde

What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death.

Otilia de Koster

Rocks in the water don’t know the misery of rocks in the sun.

Haitian proverb

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.

Chögyam Trungpa

The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.

Henry S. Haskins

When you have a lot of things to do, get your nap out of the way first.

Jo Anderson

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.

Richard Hugo

A man of fifty is responsible for his face.

Frank L. Stanton

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Sure we’re all one, but — shh — don’t spread it around.

Jay Lynch

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.

Montesquieu

Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

I’m at that age now where just putting my cigar in its holder is a thrill.

George Burns

The today that never comes on time.

Octavio Paz

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.

André Gide

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

Carl Sandburg

To kill time is to know God.

Thomas Berger

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.

Jorge Luis Borges

The word “now” is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

Arthur Miller