Great Throughts Treasury

"I think longevity doesn't necessarily have anything to do with happiness. I mean happiness comes from facing challenges and going out on a limb and taking risks. If you're not willing to take a risk for something you really care about, you might as well be dead."

"A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?"

"You bluffed me! I don't like it when people bluff me. It makes me question my perception of reality."

"People are simply incapable of prolonged, sustained goodness."

"If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life."

"I am going to concentrate on what's important in life. I'm going to strive everyday to be a kind and generous and loving person. I'm going to keep death right here, so that anytime I even think about getting angry at you or anybody else, I'll see death and I'll remember."

"But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument."

"By mid-November I always like to have an extra 15 pounds on me."

"I used to think of all the billions of people in the world, and of all those people, how was I going to meet the right ones? The right ones to be my friends, the right one to be my husband. Now I just believe you meet the people you're supposed to meet."

"I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith."

"A person has three choices in life. You can swim against the tide and get exhausted, or you can tread water and let the tide sweep you away, or you can swim with the tide, and let it take you where it wants you to go."

"Death is the enemy. I spent 10 years of my life singlemindedly studying, practicing, fighting hand to hand in close quarters to defeat the enemy, to send him back bloodied and humble and I am not going to roll over and surrender."

"I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't think you can measure life in terms of years. I think longevity doesn't necessarily have anything to do with happiness. I mean happiness comes from facing challenges and going out on a limb and taking risks. If you're not willing to take a risk for something you really care about, you might as well be dead."

"It's just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we're all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. it's like a kind of poetry."

"It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living."

"Men are confused. They're conflicted. They want a woman who's their intellectual equal, but they're afraid of women like that. They want a woman they can dominate, but then they hate her for being weak. It's an ambivalence that goes back to a man's relationship with his mother. Source of his life, center of his universe, object of both his fear and his love."

"Listen, can you hear it? Spring's sweet cantata. The strains of grass pushing through the snow. The song of buds swelling on the vine. The tender timpani of a baby robin's heart. Spring."

"Let's not kid ourselves. Whatever we diagnose, most patients, if they don't die, get well by themselves. Our job is mainly to try to make them feel better; do no harm."

"Marriage. It's like a cultural hand-rail. It links folks to the past and guides them to the future."

"One person can have a profound effect on another. And two people...well, two people can work miracles. They can change a whole town. They can change the world."

"Time for the weather report. It's cold out folks. Bonecrushing cold. The kind of cold which will wrench the spirit out of a young man, or forge it into steel."

"Trees like to have kids climb on them, but trees are much bigger than we are, and much more forgiving."

"We hold in our hands, the most precious gift of all: Freedom. The freedom to express our art. Our love. The freedom to be who we want to be. We are not going to give that freedom away and no one shall take it from us!"

"Sometimes the mind, for reasons we don't necessarily understand, just decides to go to the store for a quart of milk."

"There is nothing sadder in this world than the waste of human potential. The purpose of evolution is to raise us out of the mud, not have us grovelling in it."

"Real meaningful endeavours, the biggies in human existence, often require the sacrifice of others."

"There can be no spirituality, no sanctity, no truth without the female sex."

"There were always people like the pope. They serve a certain function, of course. They subsidize us. But, they don't create anything and they must never be allowed to stop the artist from creating."

"There's a lot to be said for self-delusionment when it comes to matters of the heart."

"Well, you're either lovers or you're wanting to be lovers or you're trying not to be lovers so you can be friends, but any way you look at it, sex is always looming in the picture like a shadow, like an undertow."

"What are man and woman if not members of two very different and warring tribes? Yet decade after decade, century after century, they attempt in marriage to reconcile and forge a union. Why? I don't know. Biological imperative? Divine law? Or just a desire to connect to that mysterious other? In any case, it's always struck me as a hopeful thing."