Being a good person, or a better person, or whatever it is you're worried about and trying to fix? It shouldn't change who you are. It means you become more like yourself.

I believe it's never too late to change. I'm eighty-one years old, but I still think I can be a better person tomorrow than I am today. And that's what I'll believe until I run out of tomorrows.

Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.

I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?

Art like life is an open secret.

Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great...

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care...Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small...

His life was still too short, to know that there is no more imminent thing than the impossible, and that what we must always foresee is the unexpected.

Let every man be master of his time.

I have set my life upon a cast,And I will stand the hazard of the die.

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to...

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator -- though he would...

I can pretend it's all pretend! I can be the life of your death and you can be the death of my life… what a trade-off!

Small talk… Bernie resented it more than life itself. The weather, sports scores, frivolous gossip… nothing real, nothing serious, nothing meaningful about it. People were experts at wasting their...

Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million...

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our...

Morning seems to come earlier every year I live.

What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless.

Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

The best life you can have as you get into old age is good food, good teeth to eat it with, and few worries when you go to bed at night.

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. At any moment you may be strolling...