Favorite quotes

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

It’s better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Life is easier to take than you think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable.

It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts!

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it’s good fun.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, ”Come on in, the living’s find,” and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.