Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

I make no apologies for you. After all, each one of us is little more than the meager residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives.

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.

The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task at hand covers both bases, but not often.

Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.

Physical Fitness is the basis for all other forms of excellence.

What's wrong with being number two?

And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.