Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
There was beauty in the idea of freedom, but it was an illusion. Every human heart was chained by love.
Life will not break your heart. It'll crush it.
Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.
Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit
I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her.
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
When things go wrong, don't go with them.
I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
If there were such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood.
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people that they don't like.
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.
It's not what you say out of your mouth that determines your life, it's what you whisper to yourself that has the most power!