What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

Leaders create influence with the clays of criticism others throw at them. They don't take offence

Reason shows us there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Men come together in cities in order to live: they remain together in order to live the good life

I had friends who ran off to become ski instructors or worked in cool bars, and I often envied them, but I know I'd quickly become bored with that kind of life. I always need to push myself.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

Most people ultimately realize that they can acquire things, change their partner or other things, consume more and still it doesn't work. I'm not criticizing any of this.

If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.

The greatest risk in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing and becomes nothing.

Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.

He was neither clever nor sensitive, but he was loyal--stubbornly sometimes, and even annoyingly and stupidly so in later life.