Being happy is easy. Easy until you start believing that happiness is tied to a relationship, a job, your income, a product you buy, fame, a status, or any of a number of things that you don't currently have in your possession. Being happy is easy, a...
He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are te...
This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, an...
On feeling guilty about lack of 'productivity': "In a time of infirmity, the illness IS one's work. Taking care of all the disciplines that our health problems require IS the other part of the small daily fidelity to which we are called, beside the f...
She’s an absolute idiot!” she added with the wisdom invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyo...
A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training wi...
When you stop pretending to be who you are not and start being yourself, there is a big risk: significant people in your life may not accept you and leave. Yet, when you stop being yourself and pretend to be who you are not, there is a much bigger ri...
Just resolve to shine, constantly and steadily, like a warm lamp in the corner, and people will want to move towards you in order to feel happy, and to read things more clearly. You will be bright and constant in a world of dark and flux, and this wi...
A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order t...
Veganism is about nonviolence. It is about not engaging in harm to other sentient beings; to oneself; and to the environment upon which all beings depend for life. In my view, the animal rights movement is, at its core, a movement about ending violen...
Rob: It made sense to pool our collective loathing for the opposite sex, and while we were at it, you get to share a bed with somebody at the same time. We were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain dispos...
Little Bill Daggett: Look son, being a good shot, being quick with a pistol, that don't do no harm, but it don't mean much next to being cool-headed. A man who will keep his head and not get rattled under fire, like as not, he'll kill ya. It ain't so...
I have always believed that if you need to take your clothes off to get your man, you've begun to lose the battle. If you pull it off right, you can do it in a very classy way... Being sexy is about suggestion; it's about the tease. It's not about be...
Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at ...
When we are impatient, we are neither reverential nor reflective because we are too self-centered. Whereas faith and patience are companions, so are selfishness and impatience. It is so easy to be confrontive without being informative; so easy to be ...
Being in love, I find myself smiling for no reason at all...
It’s not how I view being a salesman. It’s how I live being a salesman.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
It considers this Jesus as ultimately decisive, definitive, archetypal for man in these various dimensions of his.
Even manifestly senseless suffering and death can have a meaning, can acquire a meaning. a hidden meaning.